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When You Write a Letter 


Some Suggestions as to Why, When, and 
How It Should Be Done 


BY 


THOMAS ARKLE CLARK 


Dean of Men and Professor of Rhetoric 
University of Illinois 


BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO. 


CHICAGO NEW YORK BOSTON 


CoPyRIGHT, 1921 
By BENJ. H. SANBORN & CO. 


To my former students and 
all others who have not 
answered my letters 





PREFACE 


Everybody writes letters, but not every- 
body does it well. The ability to write 
a good letter couched in effective language 
and put into correct form upon appro- 
priate stationery constitutes a tremendous 
business, political, and social asset. This 
little book does not guarantee to make you 
perfect in these details, but it does under- 
take to interest you and to offer you dis- 
tinct help. 


Tuomas ARKLE CLARK 
Urbana, Illinois 


August I, I92I 





CONTENTS 


LETTER-WRITING . 
MATERIALS AND Form 
Tue Frienpiy LETTER . 
Format Notes. 

Tue Business LETTER 
LETTERS OF COURTESY 


39 
69 
95 

113 

147 





LETTER-WRITING 


LETTER-WRITING 


This little volume is not to be a text- 
book; it is not even to be a “Ready Letter 
Writer” with illustrations of how to pre- 
sent an offer of marriage to a young 
woman, how to get a kitchen range from 
a mail-order house, or how to compose a 
letter that will have “pull” and get the 
big business. It is simply a friendly sug- 
gestive personal talk between you and me 
on the subject of writing letters of all 
sorts, good form and its importance, the 
effect of the unexpected, and the latent 
social and business possibilities of the art. 
I am going to tell you, in a very personal 
way, some of the things I have learned 
through thirty years of experience and ob- 
servation in writing social and friendly 
and business letters to all sorts of men, 
in trying to teach high school students and 
college undergraduates how to write ac- 
ceptable letters, and in waiting for months 
and years for the letter which was ex- 
pected but which never came. 

There was a time, not far beyond the 
memory of some who are still living, when 
letter-writing was a very precise art, prac- 

2 


LETTER-WRITING 


ticed with scrupulous care and at long 
intervals, and demanding discriminating 
thought. Even in my own childhood, 
which is not a very remote period as his- 
tory goes, I recall that the writing of a 
letter was not a task to be undertaken 
lightly, or accomplished without consid- 
erable serious preparation. It was anal- 
ogous to preparing for threshers or getting 
ready to entertain the minister; all the 
family had a part in it and no one was 
allowed to shirk his duty. 

Once a year a letter was written to 
our relatives in northern England. This 
letter was carefully, thoughtfully, and, 
I might almost say, prayerfully done. 
There were no misspellings of “received” 
or ‘‘accommodate,” no sentences without 
subjects or verbs, no constructions whose 
grammatical parentage was in question, no 
careless illegible penmanship, no omission 
of vital and necessary details. The writ- 
ing was like copper plate, the items of 
news were sifted and carefully thought 
out. Even though my father, who did the 
writing, had had little formal training in 
the subtle art of composition, this letter 
would have borne the cold scrutiny of a 

3 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


doctor of philosophy teaching freshman 
composition in college. I think father 
would have been given an A. The reply 
which came six months later was equally 
irreproachable, and had been the subject 
of equal care by our English relatives. 
One has only to read the books written 
a century or more ago to see how great a 
part letter-writing played in the best lit- 
erature extant. The shelves of our libra- 
ries are full of illustrations of the fact 
that many great writers have done some 
of their best work in the letters written 
to their friends. Richardson’s first novel— 
the first work in English, in fact, to be 
worthy of the name of novel—was a series 
of letters written in the stiff formal style 
of the eighteenth century. Lord Chester- 
field’s letters to his son can scarcely be 
matched in the essays of any great writer 
of his time, for their delightful refined 
literary style, their keen insight into 
human nature, their truthful depicting of 
the thought and customs of the day. In 
our own time the letters of Robert Louis 
Stevenson are as representative of that 
writer’s charm and genius as anything else 
that he has written, and many another 
4 


LETTER-WRITING 


modern writer has shown how effective 
informal letters can be. 

In the olden days letter-writing was not 
so commonly practiced as now. Rela- 
tively few letters were written, and these 
few were not done thoughtlessly. There 
were good reasons for this. The cost of 
sending letters was excessive, and economy 
was of necessity practiced more rigidly 
than now; a dollar was seldom spent with- 
out deliberation. The writing and send- 
ing of a letter was a matter to be weighed 
carefully before it should be undertaken. 
To get a letter was a great event to be 
looked forward to with interest and pleas- 
ure and to be remembered and spoken of 
to the neighbors long afterward. Letters 
were passed around from one person to 
another and regarded with a respect and 
a consideration which we today, whose 
mail is crowded with all sorts of communi- 
cations, can hardly understand. 

I recall a story which my mother used 
to tell of the time in England when the 
postage used to be paid upon the receipt 
of the letter. A shrewd servant girl and 
her brother, both very poor, devised the 
scheme of sending communications to each 

5 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


other through certain hieroglyphics drawn 
upon the envelope, which supposedly con- 
tained the letter which one had written 
to the other. When either received this 
letter from the hand of the postman, he 
looked at it for a moment, deciphered the 
message upon the outside, and then gave 
it back, with the statement that, though 
he would like very much to get the letter, 
the postage demanded was beyond his 
means. It was such practices as just de- 
scribed, it is said, that led Rowland Hill 
to work for penny postage in England. 
Changing business and social conditions, 
the reduction of postage, inventions, the 
introduction of stenography and typewrit- 
ing have revolutionized letter-writing and 
in many ways have taken away from it its 
charm and its personal flavor. Now every 
one writes letters and every one gets them. 
We write letters as thoughtlessly and as 
carelessly as we use the telephone or go 
to the movies. It makes as little impres- 
sion on us to get a letter as it does to see 
an automobile or an airplane. The morn- 
ing mail brings me communications from 
wash women asking me to help them col- 
lect their bills, and from college presidents 


LETTER-WRITING 


inquiring how to eliminate hazing, or to 
discourage Theta Nu Epsilon, and one has 
in it about as much individuality as the 
other. Usually both of them are type- 
written, for the college president has a 
stenographer and the laundress has a 
daughter in high school who uses a type- 
writer. 

We write ten letters now where we 
wrote one fifty years ago. It is the way 
we do business, it is the way we keep in 
touch with our friends, and perform our 
social obligations. Ultimately we shall 
pay a social call by writing a letter. Per- 
haps we shall hear our sermons by corre- 
spondence. But the increase in the num- 
ber of letters we write has not improved 
our epistolary style; it has on the contrary 
made our writing more mechanical, less 
intimate, less personal and individual. If 
we have a stenographer she assumes all 
responsibility for our spelling, our punc- 
tuation, our sentence structure, and in fact 
for everything else excepting the bald 
business facts which our letters contain. 

“How do you spell ‘ammonia’?’ [I 
heard one of his employees ask a business 
man not long ago. 

7 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


“IT don’t know anything about spelling 
or grammar,” was his reply. ‘“That’s my 
stenographer’s business. I simply tell her 
what to say and she fixes it up all right.” 
I had had enough letters from him, how- 
ever, to know that his stenographer was 
quite as deeply immersed in orthographic 
and grammatical darkness as was he him- 
self, and that he was blissfully in igno- 
rance of the fact. 

Stenography has done a great deal to 
facilitate and accelerate letter-writing, but 
in many ways it has injured and cheapened 
the art. Very few men dictate as they 
talk. They fall into a conventional me- 
chanical style, often verbose, and usually 
abrupt and lacking in grace and rhythm. 
It is pretty hard to talk cleverly into a 
dictaphone or to extemporize mellifluous 
phrases to a man fingering a stenotype. 
Some men can give a personal human 
touch to a dictated letter, but the number 
is limited. Dictated letters are in- 
frequently planned with much care, and 
such a letter usually contains more words 
and says less than a letter written by hand. 
The limitations of time in writing a letter 
in longhand give opportunity for thought 

8 





LETTER-WRITING 


and discrimination in the choice of words 
and induces brevity and directness of ex- 
pression. One has not time to say as much 
when writing longhand as when dictating, 
and so chooses his phrases and his ideas 
more carefully, plans his ideas more 
thoughtfully, and says more effectively 
what he has to say. 

I was to make an after-dinner speech 
not long ago, and while I was dressing, my 
wife, who is naturally interested in my 
postprandial success, asked, 

“What are you going to say tonight?” 

“T haven’t the least idea,’ I replied 
truthfully, trusting in Providence, as most 
men do in such a situation, that something 
clever would come into my mind at the last 
minute. 

“Oh, dear,’ she exclaimed, with a sort 
of hopeless note in her voice, “‘you’ll talk 
a long time then.” And it is as true of 
writing as it is of speech that the man who 
makes no preparation, who ‘“‘takes his pen 
in hand” with no definite plan in his mind 
when he begins to write is likely to wander 
on for a long time without getting any- 
where. 

I think we all realize the possibilities of 

9 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


letter writing as a business asset, but per- 
haps only when immediate business is in 
sight. In a moment of thoughtlessness I 
confided in a friend not long ago my inten- 
tion shortly to buy a motor car. He, lack- 
ing something to talk about, disclosed the 
information to a second friend, who had a 
connection with the automobile business. 
Then the news spread, and at once my 
mail became heavy with letters. Most 
of these were circular letters devised cun- 
ningly to imitate typewriting, and so 
phrased as to seem like a personal appeal 
to me; but the disguise was thin and most 
of them went into the wastepaper basket 
without my even reading them to the end. 
I hate the multigraphed letter—it never 
deceives even an infant. I feel about it 
as I do when an acquaintance says to me, 
“Drop around and take dinner with us any 
time.” His invitation has nothing per- 
sonal or definite in it and is not one I 
should think of accepting. It makes no 
intimate appeal. 

One of the letters, however, did interest 
me because it was personal, and it came 
from a man who had previously shown 
some interest in me. He had written me 

10 


LETTER-WRITING 


once when I was ill or had performed some 
service that had attracted his attention, 
a letter he was in no way under obligation 
to write; he had done so purely from cour- 
tesy. The letter that he wrote me this 
time was not a stock letter, but one that 
recognized me as an individual with some 
personal idiosyncrasies, with needs and 
tastes different from those of other indi- 
viduals. I replied to his letter, and there 
is every indication that I shall buy his 
car, and I hold that in writing me the 
courteous, unsolicited, and unselfish note 
when he had no business axe to grind he 
played his business cards with the greatest 
finesse. He had my ear at once when he 
wanted to do business with me. He had 
learned, as many business men have not, I 
am sorry to say, that there are many let- 
ters besides the purely business letter that 
ultimately get a good deal of business. 
As I write this last sentence there comes 
to my mind a little Italian fruit-vender 
that drifted across my domestic horizon a 
few years ago, who had in some subtle way 
learned the effectiveness of the courteous 
note in business relationships. 

His real name was Sam, but we named 

II 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


him “‘Cucus”’ because when he first arrived 
from his birthplace in southern Italy and 
began his daily round with his pushcart 
delivering fruit and vegetables at our back 
door, he had his own difficulties with our 
unmusical language and announced the 
early green cucumbers as ‘“‘cucus.” 

His honesty, his soft, pleasant voice, 
and his ingratiating manners won trade 
for him, and it was not long until he was 
driving a wagon of his own with his name 
painted in gold along the side. He learned 
gradually to speak a little better, and at 
night school he learned to write a very 
round and very readable hand, though his 
orthography, his diction, and his punctua- 
tion retained some original touches, a 
condition not in any sense unique. 

He had his own troubles, too, as other 
business men have had, and sometimes he 
told them confidentially to me. His con- 
signments of fruit were not always good, 
he could not always dispose of his stock 
before it became stale, and sometimes land- 
ladies did not pay him or unregenerate 
students imposed upon him and gave him 
bad checks. It was about such a check 
that he spoke to me. Cucus was out 

IZ 


LETTER-WRITING 


eight dollars which he could ill afford to 
lose. He had somehow developed a feel- 
ing that I need but say the word and 
any recreant undergraduate would imme- 
diately come to time. When he had told 
me his story, I found that his was not a 
difficult matter of adjustment. I agreed 
to manage it for him, received his gracious 
thanks and a handful of fresh carrots, at- 
tended to the little business the next day, 
and forgot about it. 

A few days later I found a note from 
him in my morning mail. The spelling is 
his own; the ‘“‘Urbanana’”’ probably an 
echo of his favorite morning announce- 
ment at our back door. 


Champaign, I]linois. 

Oct. 18 - 1916 
Mr. Thomas Arkel Clark 

University of Illinois 
Urbanana, Illinois 
My dear Mr. Clarke 
I droped you this few lines to let you 
know that Mr Devine paid me today so I 
have get my money from him. I am 
thank you very much, and I remain your 
very sincery freind 
SAM 


13 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


I held the letter in my hand a long time, 
thinking. I do business mostly with culti- 
vated, educated people; I wish they were 
all as thoughtful and courteous as this 
Italian fruit-vender. He had already 
learned something of the personal touch 
in business through letter-writing. 

It is curious how many letters are never 
acknowledged or answered in any way, 
and yet every letter, and especially every 
letter that has in it anything of the per- 
sonal element, is entitled to a reply of 
some sort. Every day as part of the rou- 
tine of my office I am writing to the fathers 
of various young men who are registered 
as undergraduates in college. ‘These let- 
ters are personal and direct, and they show 
a knowledge and an interest in the indi- 
vidual with whom they are concerned. 
But, strangely enough, very few of them 
are ever acknowledged, or, if they are ac- 
knowledged, it is quite often the mother 
rather than the father who replies. 

“Mr. Jones received your letter,’’ she 
writes, ‘and being a very busy man he has 
asked me to reply’—then follow many 
pages of explanation and appreciation. It 
has always been a matter of interest and 

14 


LETTER-WRITING 


wonderment to me how these busy men 
with stenographers at their call, usually, 
find so little time to give to the affairs of 
their sons, while their wives apparently 
have nothing else to do but write. I have 
just been talking over the long distance 
telephone with a prominent and successful 
business man to whom, within the last 
three months, I have written twice about 
his son. He answered neither of my let- 
ters, he explained to me, because he first 
wanted to see how the boy would respond 
to the advice he had written him upon 
the receipt of my first letter. His method, 
however, did not encourage me _ very 
strongly to continue my efforts. 

The general tendency is to reply only 
to letters that are a matter of self-interest 
or self-advantage. If a reply brings me 
no profit or pleasure, why make it? If 
I owe Jones and, for one reason or another, 
have delayed in meeting my obligation, I 
hear from him quickly and often; if he 
owes me and I write him, the mail service 
is usually pretty slow if it does not cease 
entirely. It has been my misfortune for 
a considerable number of years to be indi- 
rectly responsible for the collection of va- 

15 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


rious sums of money—subscriptions to cer- 
tain funds, fraternity and sorority notes, 
loans due the University from graduates 
who were given financial help while they 
were in college. I have written some of 
these delinquents twice a year for seven- 
teen years without getting a reply. If I 
happened to meet one of them and the 
matter of his obligation came up, I asked: 

“Why did you not reply to any of the 
letters I wrote you?” 

“Well,” he would say, quite without 
shame, “I didn’t have the money; so what 
was the use of wasting my time and a 
postage stamp in saying so?” 

He seemed never to realize that an ex- 
planation of his delay and his delinquency 
was due me. 

It is always a satisfaction to get a gra- 
cious reply to a letter. Even when I am 
convinced that some of the statements 
contained are exaggerations, and that the 
promises may never be fulfilled, I am 
pleased as was a wealthy friend of mine 
who confessed to me once that he enjoyed 
flattery, only “it must not be crudely 
done.” | 

If I write a letter, as I often must, to 

16 


LETTER-WRITING 


the father of a former student asking for 
the present address of the young man, I 
may wait for weeks before receiving a 
reply, and quite as often as not I shall 
never get one. If, however, in writing, 
I say that I find that he is entitled to a 
certain rebate, or that it would be to his 
scholastic advantage if I can hear from 
him, the reply is sure to come immediately. 
Self-interest seems to be the strongest mo- 
tive to induce people to answer letters. 

Why do not people answer letters? 
Often it is carelessness or laziness. They 
mean to, or at least they say to themselves 
that they do, but they delay, as sinners 
delay joining church. Ultimately the let- 
ter is lost and they forget all about it. 
They inveigle themselves into believing 
that they haven’t the time, as a freshman 
at seven forty-five in the morning per- 
suades himself that he can still snatch ten 
minutes of sleep and get to an eight o’clock 
class. They are indifferent or ignorant. 

“T have not had a reply from Mr. Rice 
whom you gave as reference,” I say to a 
junior who has applied for a loan from 
-one of the college loan funds, “do you 
have any idea why?” 

17 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


“Well, Mr. Rice is a very busy man,” 
is his explanation, “and I suppose he has 
not yet got around to it.” 

But in reality the fact that he is busy 
is usually the last reason why a man does 
not reply to a letter. The really busy 
man must have system or his work piles 
up. He clears his desk daily knowing that 
new duties and obligations will be upon 
him tomorrow. I write to such a man 
on Monday and by Wednesday morning 
I have his reply. He has no time to waste 
in useless temporizing and delay. The 
busy man decides things at once and gets 
them done; it is the lazy man and the 
loafer and the procrastinator whom one 
never hears from, and the man who has 
no regular system of doing things. 

Not long ago I published a brief article 
on the subject of acknowledging letters, 
especially letters of sympathy and con- 
gratulation. Any number of people to 
whom I had at one time or another written 
such a letter called me up or spoke to me, 
or wrote me about the matter, and the 
tenor of their communications was that it 
had never occurred to them that such a 
letter required an acknowledgment. One 
18 


LETTER-WRITING 


boy wrote, “I was very much ashamed of 
‘myself when I read your little essay in 
Sunday morning’s paper and remembered 
that when you wrote me last summer I 
made no acknowledgment of your thought- 
fulness. Worse than that, I did not realize 
that I should have done so. It did not 
occur to me that a reply to your letter 
which gave to me and to my parents so 
much pleasure and satisfaction was re- 
quired, and that it might possibly have 
made you feel as happy as your letter 
made me. I think many people are prob- 
ably as ignorant of this subject as I was, 
for no one has ever before called my atten- 
tion to my duty in such a case. [ assure 
you I shall not offend in the future.” 
Very few letters but are entitled to an ac- 
knowledgment of some sort. It leaves a 
good taste in a body’s mouth to receive a 
reply to a letter he has written, no matter 
how trifling the business is with which it is 
concerned. 

If letters are to be answered at all, they 
should be answered promptly, excepting 
perhaps friendly letters, where there is 
ordinarily a sort of understanding between 
friends that a reasonable number of days 

19 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


or weeks or months shall intervene be- 
tween the exchange of communications. 
One of the dearest friends I have, from 
whom I am separated by a thousand miles, 
writes to me and I to him once a year. 
Neither expects more than this, and each 
looks forward to the annual letter with 
interest and pleasure. Ordinarily, how- 
ever, a letter should be answered at once. 

I heard a man say not long ago, a man, 
too, whose correspondence is large, that 
he regularly delayed answering letters be- 
cause if one delayed he would find that 
many letters really answered themselves 
and so did not require a written reply. I 
was interested to note, however, that the 
top of his desk was always in a litter, that 
he could never find anything that he 
wanted, and that his drawers, when he 
opened them furtively, were crowded with 
a jumbled mess of papers. People com- 
plained often, also, that their communica- 
tions to him were ignored, that their re- 
quests received no attention, and that his 
official business was in more or less of a 
tangle. He paid rather dearly, I am con- 
vinced, as every man does for delay and 
neglect in his correspondence. 

20 


LETTER-WRITING 


People sometimes do not reply to let- 
ters because they are at a loss to know 
what to say. This is especially true of 
letters of congratulation and condolence. 
Something ought to be said, but what? 
The situation is similar to speaking to an 
acquaintance or a friend who has just lost 
a very near member of his household. We 
are so afraid of saying the wrong thing 
that we say nothing. In either case if we 
would only give expression in as direct and 
simple a way as possible to what we feel, 
we should have done a gracious thing and 
should have brought pleasure or comfort 
to one of our friends. It does not quite so 
much matter what we say as that we say 
something that genuinely expresses our 
feelings or our obligations. 

Most of our reasons for not answering 
letters are selfish ones. We see no per- 
sonal profit in it; to do so would take time 
and thought, and these, we argue, we can 
not afford, not recognizing the fact that 
whatever a man really wants to do he 
will by hook or crook find an opportunity 
to do. 

The writing of letters is very much a 
matter of temperament. Not every one, 

21 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


because of lack of experience or facility in 
the use of written language, has learned 
fully to put his own personality into his 
letters, but there are very few who do not 
in some way reveal their personal charac- 
teristics through their letters. Men be- 
cause of their more general training and 
experience in business are briefer in their 
letters, more direct, less emotional, more 
practical. They get to their point more 
quickly and are often quite barren of de- 
tails and so lacking in interest. Their 
communications are like the small boy’s 
diary at sea. ‘“‘Rained,” he says laconically 
in recounting the events of one day, and 
the next, “‘Rained some more,” and that 
for him is the end of the story, being all 
that happened and all that he has to say. 

Women, on the other hand, are not so 
easily stopped. It is an unusual woman 
who can get to a simple point in less than 
four pages; often it requires eight, and 
then one is sometimes forced to re-read the 
letter to satisfy one’s self as to what the 
point is. When a father makes inquiry 
of me as to how his son is getting on in 
college he usually gets the question out 
of his system in from four to six lines. 

22 


LETTER-WRITING 


When I get such a letter from a mother 
the communication and the inquiry are 
generally accompanied with harrowing de- 
tails of infantile disasters, which had un- 
dermined his health and made it difficult 
or impossible for him to do good work. 
There are accounts of his difficulties in 
teething, of the size and influence of his 
tonsils and adenoids, of the various phys- 
ical struggles through which he has passed, 
and which have all but wrecked him. 
There is the assurance always that if I 
could only appreciate his many virtues, 
how hard he has worked, how much he 
and all his family have worried about his 
mental progress, I should be more than 
ordinarily interested in him. And what 
she really wants to know is what chance 
he has of continuing in college, but she 
does not get at that without many and 
devious preliminary peregrinations. 

I have before me now, from a woman, 
a letter which runs to two thousand words 
or more. It discusses in much incoherent 
detail various difficulties which she has had 
with her tenants, with her neighbors, and 
with a woman to whom she thought she 
had rented her house. I have read it over 

23 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


several times, and I have asked a number 
of my friends to do so, and together we 
have concluded that what she really wants 
is to ask me if I should be willing to speak 
at a parents’ association at some not dis- 
tant date. 

Now these women to whom I refer are 
not illiterate women. Many of them have 
been to college. Some of them have been 
teachers, and the one to whom [I have last 
referred is the wife of an educated man, 
and was herself for several years a teacher. 
If there is a reason for this curious pro- 
lixity in their written speech, it lies, I 
suppose, in the fact that most women have 
had little actual contact with business. 
They are unfamiliar with business meth- 
ods; they do not approach a subject di- 
rectly; they are given to complicated 
explanations. 

It is never wise to use sarcasm or to 
show anger in a letter. The words that 
are spoken in a passion become blurred 
and faded with time; their sharpness is 
dulled as other events intervene, and ulti- 
mately we may forget them altogether, 
but the written word eats into our memory 
and galls us more and more as time goes 

24 


LETTER-WRITING 


on. If we try to forget it, there is still the 
written page to turn to, and the wound 
which is caused at first is reopened. Sar- 
casm always inflames; it is a cruel weapon 
against which, with many people, there is 
little or no defense. It sometimes brings 
the desired result for the moment, but it 
is likely to cause a permanent feud be- 
tween the two people concerned in the cor- 
respondence. Men are thicker skinned 
than women and do not take this sort of 
attack quite so seriously as women do, but 
even men seldom quite forget the sarcastic 
slam in a letter. Women never forget it 
and never quite forgive it. When you 
have written a woman a sarcastic letter 
you might as well bring yourself to the 
conclusion that in the future all diplomatic 
relations between the two of you will 
cease. She will never see you without re- 
calling your words; she will have it in for 
you as long as you live. 

It is generally a weak and cowardly 
thing to write a sarcastic, angry letter. It 
is seldom if ever justified excepting to 
stimulate the stolid. It is cowardly be- 
cause there is often so little “comeback” ; 
it is not a-fair open fight. On the surface 

25 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


sarcasm is harmless, without evil intention 
or guile, but concealed within it is the 
deadly poison and the sting. It is really 
meant to hurt. It is weak to show anger 
because the angry man has for the moment 
lost control of himself; he admits that he 
has not the physical strength of self-mas- 
tery and such weakness is ordinarily pitia- 
ble. The angry man must ultimately 
apologize for his weakness or leave himself 
permanently in a bad light, and he is often 
too weak to apologize. 

Not long ago a young sophomore 
brought me a letter which he had just re- 
ceived from his father. The boy had 
failed in a part of his college work, and a 
notice of the fact had gone to the father, 
who received it, I presume, in his morn- 
ing mail. The disappointment and the 
disgrace of it angered him, for he knew 
that the boy was quite capable of doing 
his work well, and he yielded weakly to 
the impulse of the moment and wrote his 
son and mailed the letter without reading 
it, perhaps, and certainly without giving 
any considerate thought to what he had 
written. It was a cruel, scathing letter 
that any father should have been ashamed 

26 


LETTER-WRITING 


to write, and it cut the boy like a knife. 
The boy will never quite forget it, espe- 
cially since the father who no doubt re- 
gretted his action as soon as he had had 
a little while to come to himself, never 
could quite bring himself in so many words 
to say so. And the gap gradually widened 
between the two. 

Every one has a tendency to write let- 
ters when he is angry; in fact, I am sure 
I do my cleverest work under such cir- 
cumstances. Feeling stimulates the im- 
agination, and so for the time being adds 
‘force and effectiveness to the style. When 
I write such a letter, I always read it over 
with an appreciation of its ironical subtle- 
ness, of its careful phrasing, of its stinging 
effects, and I admit generally that it is a 
corking good piece of work that will bring 
the recipient to his senses. And then be- 
fore signing it I lay it away until the next 
day. Next morning when I come into my 
office after a good night’s rest I read the 
letter again and laugh, and admit to my- 
self how well done it is, and then I tear 
it up and drop it carefully into the waste- 
paper basket and write another—much 
less clever, no doubt, not so well phrased, 

27 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


perhaps, but quite logical, quite free from 
malice and anger. It is a plan which has 
worked well for me and one that I sub- 
mit for the sympathetic consideration of 
others. It gives me all the exhilaration 
and satisfaction of writing a letter that 
takes the skin off, and I am never humili- 
ated by having to apologize for having 
done a thoughtless or ungentlemanly 
thing. 

A letter of apology is a very difficult 
letter to write, and it is seldom done well. 
The most of such letters as I have seen 
have been done awkwardly, haltingly, 
with little genuineness and finesse. I pre- 
sume the reason is that we write them be- 
cause we ought to do it and not because 
we want to do it. Our parents or our 
wives or the Dean insists that it be done, 
and we yield with reservations. An ac- 
quaintance of mine has been waiting for 
weeks, I am convinced, in an attempt to 
get up his courage to write me a letter of 
apology for an asinine thing he said to 
me, but he isn’t quite up to it. The let- 
ter will come in time, but it will be badly 
done; it will be an attempt to justify 
himself rather than a real apology; he will 

28 


LETTER-WRITING 


try to explain why he was a fool; it would 
be just as well if he did not write the let- 
ter, for a badly made apology is like a 
left-handed compliment. I recall such a 
one. A group of young people were “rag- 
ging’ me when I was a boy on the too 
generous outlines of my mouth. Since 
nothing hurts so badly as the truth, their 
remarks were teasing me not a little. A 
kind old lady sitting by, hoping to miti- 
gate their insults and to placate my 
wounded feelings, said, patting me gently 
on the arm, ‘‘Never mind what they are 
saying, [ve seen bigger mouths than 
yours.” It is true that she was a woman 
who had seen a good deal of the world, 
but it was always a query in my mind 
whether or not she had exaggerated to 
cheer me up. 

It takes a generous spirit to make a good 
apology. There should be no holding 
back. If you have been wrong, you should — 
admit it without alibi or reservation. To 
do otherwise is simply to add to the origi- 
nal insult. It is not necessary to say much; 
one should say nothing unless it be sincere 
and genuine and comes from the heart. 

“T made a fool of myself in your office 

20 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


the other day,” a boy wrote me—he really 
used a qualifying word before “‘fool’’ which 
I omit for the sake of appearances—‘“‘and 
I’m sorry. I hope the memory of the in- 
cident has not given you as much pain as 
it has given me. If you can overlook my 
discourtesy, I assure you that I shall not 
be guilty again. The fault was entirely 
mine.” Nothing more needed to be said. 

It is seldom safe to joke in a letter ex- 
cepting with very intimate friends who 
know one’s personal idiosyncrasies and 
mental habits. A joke is based most fre- 
quently upon exaggeration or upon an un- 
expected turn in the use of words or some 
deformity of speech, and we are looking 
for none of these in a letter from a stranger 
and seldom know what to make of them 
when we come across them in his letter. 
The effectiveness of humor depends so 
much more often than we think upon the 
unexpected emphasis we place upon words, 
upon the glance of the eye, the raising 
of the eyebrows, the intonation of the 
voice, the momentary hesitation before the 
last word. One may have all these in 
mind when he is writing a letter, but they 
are absent when the letter is read, and 

30 


LETTER-WRITING 


there is nothing left usually but the bald, 
cold statement of facts bared of all its 
subtleties and suggestiveness. J have so 
often bee1. misunderstood when I have 
tried to be funny or have unconsciously 
been so in a letter, that I have given it up. 
I remember writing to a father once and 
saying to him that he gave his son such 
a generous monthly allowance that it re- 
quired all the boy’s time to spend it and 
left him no opportunity to devote any at- 
tention to his studies. The father came 
back at me very seriously by demonstrat- 
ing conclusively that with the experience 
his son had previously had he could easily 
spend all his allowance in half the time 
at his disposal. I have never been sure 
which of us misunderstood the other. 
Now, however, I either omit jokes from 
my general correspondence or tie a label 
to them. It is too great a risk to let them 
go uncatalogued. 

The business and social and diplomatic 
possibilities of writing letters are infinite. 
It is a process by which we make and keep 
our friends, or increase our business, or 
widen our influence. By it we can hold 
people’s attention, or awaken their inter- 

31 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


est, or change their conduct. We can 
make them happy, or drive them to de- 
spair. I had a letter only recently from 
an old friend of mine whom I had not seen 
or heard from since we were boys of eight- 
een. He had stumbled upon my name 
and picture in a magazine, and these had 
recalled to him, as his letter recalled to 
me, all our boyhood relationships. His 
letter brought back to me my youth with 
all the friends I had known, all the es- 
capades of which I had been a part, all 
the subtle influences which had combined 
to form my character. The few sentences 
of his letter spread out before me again 
the whole panorama of my youth. A let- 
ter I received thirty-five years ago or more 
—a very commonplace letter it might have 
seemed to a casual reader—changed my 
whole future. It made me give up the 
work I was then engaged in and drove me 
to college. It stimulated me to study and 
gave me an ambition to see the world. 
Writing letters is something more than 
merely putting one word after another 
upon paper. It is an art, and an art almost 
universally employed, which is well worth 
our study. To write letters well we must 
os 


LETTER-WRITING 


realize something of the effect of appear- 
ance and form as men and women must 
know the same thing if they are to dress 
becomingly. Since I have been writing 
these paragraphs I have seen a beautiful 
letter of condolence which came far short 
of its possibilities simply because it was 
written on the wrong sort of paper, and 
folded badly, and followed a crude form, 
and it fell still farther short of what it 
should have accomplished because it was 
written by an educated man who should 
have known better how to dress up his 
thoughts—and who was disappointing be- 
cause he did it so badly. His letter was 
like a man going to a formal party in 
overalls. 

The successful writing of letters is 
largely a matter of psychology. No two 
people are affected in quite the same way; 
what will be pleasing or compelling in 
one case will irritate or have little effect 
in another. We should study the indi- 
vidual. The form letter makes this in- 
dividual study difficult or impossible. It 
is meant to apply to all cases. It must 
be like a proprietary medicine, com- 
pounded of such a variety of drugs as to 

33 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


have some curative effect upon any disease 
to which it may be applied. It is a pan- 
acea for anything from measles to ingrow- 
ing toenails. 

The writing of letters, as I have before 
suggested, must have some regard for the 
“time and the seasons.” You cannot 
properly acknowledge the receipt of a 
Christmas present in July or express your 
appreciation of an act of courtesy shown 
you by a friend six months after the act 
has occurred. One of the greatest diffi- 
culties we all meet in writing letters is in 
finding the time to do it when it should 
be done. If Smith is elected to office and 
I wish to congratulate him, I must do it 
at once; if I owe Brown and cannot pay 
him at the time agreed upon, I must let 
him know before the loan is past due. - 
Most letters should have attention on a 
definite day, or the critical or effective 
moment is gone for good. 

I have always been sorry that I did not 
write Frank Barry when he lost his oldest 
son. We had been friends since our boy- 
hood, and I knew that he would have been 
glad to hear from me. I was crowded with 
work at the time however; I meant to do 

34 


LETTER-WRITING 


it, and then it went out of my mind until 
it would have been an insult rather than 
a courtesy for me to mention the matter 
to him in a letter. My chance was gone 
forever. 

One is helped very much in meeting this 
situation of doing the thing on time by 
having a convenient place in which to 
write letters, with a proper assortment of 
materials at hand. A fountain pen, a box 
of stationery, and a convenient desk or 
armchair in a quiet corner are all condu- 
cive to promptness in this regard. There 
are leisure moments before breakfast some- 
times, or after dinner, when if everything 
is within reach it is little trouble to write 
a letter. I have always felt about letter- 
writing as I do about reading. I know 
that if I have an attractive book on the 
table near which [I sit or lie stretched out 
upon a couch when I am waiting for meals 
or resting for a little while at the end of 
the day, I am sure to reach for it, and, 
before I know it, I am well under way. 
Before many days the book is finished and 
I am ready for another. In the same way 
I write letters. 

It is the unexpected letter that most 

Ks) 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


often brings pleasure. I run through the 
morning mail sometimes before the office 
boy lays it opened upon my desk. I know 
before the letters are opened what most 
of them will contain. They are letters in 
reply to mine of a few days before; let- 
ters of inquiry, of complaint, or of solici- 
tation; letters from relatives or friends 
who write me regularly. But once in a 
while I find a surprise in the mail. Bux- 
ton, from whom I haven’t heard for years, 
writes me from Shreveport, or Baker 
from New Orleans, or Noone from far 
away Cilicia and has something pleasant 
or complimentary to say to me. The 
whole day is brighter because of the unex- 
pected pleasure the letter gave me, and I 
make up my mind that I, too, will write 
letters even when I am not under obliga- 
tions to do so, because in so doing I may 
make some one happy, or I may hold or 
gain a friend. 

There are various sorts of letters, each 
making its own exactions and each subject 
to its own particular conventions. A 
little knowledge of form, a directness, a 
frank sincerity, a regard for the interests 
and feelings of others, and a certain in- 

36 


LETTER-WRITING 


sight into human nature, are about all 
that is required to write a good letter. If 
you have these, the result will surprise 
you and will be worth infinitely more than 
the effort it costs. 


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MATERIALS AND FORM 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


Every morning as I look through the pile 
of letters that the office boy places on my 
desk, I am impressed with the disregard 
which the writers have had of estab- 
lished conventions, of form and arrange- 
ment, of proper materials, of some of the 
most essential details of a correct letter. 
My correspondence is not conducted to any 
extent with illiterate or uneducated peo- 
ple, but in most instances with people of 
more than average training and experience 
—high school graduates, teachers, college 
officials, city business men, and men of af- 
fairs. And yet I find curious inconsist- 
encies, sentences without verbs or subjects, 
and words of the most weird orthog- 
raphy. The letters are often without 
margins or paragraphs, and are written 
upon paper of no particular size or style; 
high school boys and even teachers some- 
times using ragged sheets torn from a note- 
book or paper that in no way fits the 
envelope. Many of the letters are not 
dated, and others contain an insufficient 
address; should I desire to reply I am 
compelled to hunt through my files for 

40 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


an address. Women more often than men 
are guilty of this last fault, of omitting 
from the letter itself all indication of 
the specific address of the writer, and if 
they live in Chicago or some other large 
city the probability of such omission 
seems to become still greater. Usually, in 
such cases, if I will go into my outer office 
and stand on my head and paw about for 
a while in the waste paper basket where 
my clerk has thrown the envelopes con- 
taining the morning mail, I shall find an 
envelope on the front of which, or more 
often on the back, will be the address 
which should have been also in the letter 
itself. Ladies are most given to this error 
of writing their address on the back of the 
envelope only, never realizing that most 
business men never see the envelopes in 
which their letters come. Some men as 
well fall into it. Little discrimination is 
used as to complimentary beginnings and 
endings, “Very truly’ and “Very sin- 
cerely” are used so indiscriminately that it 
is not possible by glancing at the letter to 
guess whether it has to do with strictly 
business matters or is a friendly letter of 
courtesy. Most of my correspondents as 
41 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


well as yours have been taught a good deal 
about these and other details of form, but 
they have not considered them seriously 
or made them a part of their own daily 
habits. 

A newspaper always gives particular 
attention to the make-up of its front page, 
because that is what first catches the eye. 
First impressions are frequently the most 
lasting ones. A pretty girl is even more 
attractive if she is well dressed, and a 
good dinner is made an excellent one if 
the table is tastefully arranged and the 
courses are carefully served. So a letter 
is presented in the most effective way only 
if the materials upon which it is written 
are carefully chosen, and the form into 
which it is thrown is well considered. 

I still recall with vividness the pleasure 
I felt a few years ago on receiving a little 
note from Mr. Irving Bacheller. The sta- 
tionery was distinctive, and I have no 
doubt was a sort regularly used by him 
throughout many years. The penmanship 
was beautiful and looked almost as if each 
letter had been made separately as one 
would devise ornamental script. The 
margins were wide, almost mathematically 

42 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


even, and occupied quite half of the page. 
There were only two or three sentences in 
the entire letter, running down the middle 
of the page, but it gave me the lasting 
impression of careful arrangement, of fit- 
ness, and of perfect form. I have always 
wanted to write such a letter. 

There are those who say that in a busi- 
ness letter at least it is only the facts pre- 
sented which count. It amounts to little, 
they assert, whether you use green paper 
or yellow, whether “occurred’’ is spelled 
with one or two r’s, whether the sentences 
contain verbs or limp along with par- 
ticiples, just so what is said can be under- 
stood. I do not believe this. I feel sure 
that even though the reader is not con- 
sciously affected by it, a slovenly, badly 
arranged, illiterate letter will fall short 
in its effect even upon the uncritical reader 
who is not trained consciously to recognize 
these weaknesses. 

The materials used in writing a letter 
should, when possible, be in keeping with 
the character of the letter, and should be 
the best the writer can afford. A consider- 
able number of people, especially women 
and young folks, are not likely to have 

43 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


any sort of business stationery; they do 
not do a great deal of business by corre- 
spondence. Such people. need not be 
embarrassed if they conduct such business 
correspondence as they may have to do 
on the stationery which they ordinarily 
use for social purposes. ‘The business or 
professional man will have paper and 
envelopes especially printed or engraved 
for his business correspondence. A brief 
clear statement of his name and business 
or the name of his firm, with a definite 
unmistakable address, is, barring the date 
line or the telephone number, all that 
need be given. I often spend.time in try- 
ing to decipher from the mass of material 
which is crowded into a letterhead just 
where to address the man whose name is 
subscribed to the epistle, and often the 
best I can do is to hazard a guess. The 
less detail a business letterhead has printed 
on it and the more modest the display, 
the more effectively, I am convinced, it will 
serve its purpose. I struggled through a 
complicated elaborately designed letter- 
head a few days ago during my morning 
dictation. I spent several minutes in an- 
alyzing it, and yet I am not at all sure 
44 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


that I addressed my letter to the place 
where it should have gone. 

Thesize of paper for business corre- 
spondence is usually eleven by eight and 
one-half inches, or it may be half this size 
or somewhat more than half. On the 
smaller sheets the letterhead may be 
printed either the short or the long way of 
the paper. It is quite safe if the color of 
the paper is white, though many people 
consciously choose rather striking colors, 
such as brown or yellow or blue, for dis- 
tinctiveness and do so with good effect. 
When a given color or size of paper is 
once adopted, if it has any character, it 
should not be changed, for it will become 
in time a sort of trade-mark or sign of 
identification of the individual or of the 
firm. A successful business man whom I 
know has for years used a warm brown 
stationery printed in an ink of still darker 
brown, which gives an individual effect. 
I never see the color but it brings to mind 
his firm. It is to me one of his best adver- 
tising assets, and one which it would be a 
distinct mistake for him to change. 

Envelopes should be of the same quality 
of paper as the letter sheets used, and 

45 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


should be of a size easily to admit the 
folded sheets which they are to contain. 
Nothing is more exasperating than to find 
envelopes too short or too narrow to 
contain the folded letter, and nothing 
makes a sloppier looking letter than one 
turned up at the ends or folded into some 
unconventional shape and squeezed into a 
tight little envelope. 

A sheet eight and one-half by eleven 
inches should be folded three times—first 
from the bottom of the sheet up as the 
sheet lies flat, leaving the under edge a 
trifle longer than the upper so that the 
letter may be opened easily when it is in 
the hands of the reader. The second fold 
should be from the left to the right, turn- 
ing over slightly less than one-third of the 
double folded sheet. The third fold 
should be from the right to the left in a 
manner similar to the way in which the 
second fold was made. When completely 
folded the letter will be about three by 
five and one-half inches. There is no 
other way correctly to fold such a sheet. 
The smaller sheet mentioned above should 
be folded twice—from the left to the right 
and from the right to the left, and the 

46 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


envelope used should be of the proper size 
to admit it easily. Sometimes a sheet 
eight and a half by seven and a quarter 
inches is used, but in such a case the en- 
velopes should be seven and a half inches 
long. Otherwise the sheet will need to be 
folded up an inch or two from the bottom, 
a procedure which does not make a neat- 
looking letter. Such stationery as I have 
described with a business letterhead printed 
at the top is for business purposes only. 
It should not ordinarily be employed for 
social correspondence excepting, perhaps, 
between men who know each other well, 
and who are willing for the time being 
to ignore social conventions. The better 
you know people the more liberties you 
can take in correspondence. 

Stationery for friendly or social corre- 
spondence varies considerably in_ size. 
Women often use small folded sheets or 
correspondence cards about three and one- 
half by five and one-half inches. A stand- 
ard size of paper is approximately seven 
and a quarter by ten and a half inches. 
This may be used as single sheets, in which 
case it is folded twice to go into the en- 
velope—from the bottom up and from the 

47 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


top down, and the size of the envelope in 
this case is four by seven and a half inches; 
or it may be folded into a double sheet 
five and a quarter by seven and a quarter 
inches, in which case the envelope is three 
and three-fourths by five and three-fourths 
inches. The single sheet eight and one-half 
by five and one-half inches which comes 
made up into blocks is not a good form to 
use. It suggests crude inexperience. No ex- 
treme shades will do for this sort of letter- 
writing, if one wishes to be thought to 
have good taste. White is the best, 
though soft shades of gray are permissible. 
“Wonder what his correspondence is 
like?’ Mrs. Cheveley asks of Lord Goring 
in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. And 
then as she looks at the letters, ““Oh, what 
a very uninteresting correspondence! Who 
on earth writes to him on pink paper? 
How silly to write on pink paper! It 
looks like the beginning of a middle-class 
romance.” It looks, in fact, in these days 
like a sentimental child of fourteen. 
Many people never change the size or 
quality or shade of the paper on which 
they conduct their social correspondence. 
There is a certain individual personal touch 
48 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


in this adhering to one style that appeals 
to me. It shows a definiteness of taste, 
a certain stability of character that I ad- 
mire. One man to whom [I have written 
for many years never varies in his corre- 
spondence from the use of a light cadet 
gray. I recognize the familiar shade the 
moment the postman deposits his package 
of letters upon my desk, and the color it- 
self has come to have for me the sugges- 
tion of a personality which I enjoy. 

I do not know how much can really be 
told of a man’s character through an ex- 
amination of his penmanship; personally 
I can tell but little, but I feel sure that 
I could venture a pretty accurate guess 
concerning many of his personal traits by 
examining the general form of his letters. 
A letter without a margin looks about as 
attractive as a book or magazine would 
under the same circumstances, or as a man 
without a collar, and if the margin is nar- 
row or uneven the effect is not much better 
than it would be if there were none at all. 
There should always be a margin of 
three-quarters of an inch at least on the 
left side of the sheet. 

Abbreviations are better omitted than 

49 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


otherwise even in business letters. They 
generally show laziness or haste, and both 
of these are bad qualities to reveal in any 
sort of correspondence. They are em- 
ployed sparingly or not at all now by busi- 
ness firms who pay any careful attention 
to good form and good appearance. The 
indentations for paragraphs should be 
even. The first word of each paragraph 
should be indented about the same dis- 
tance as the width of the margin left or 
even farther than this, but these indenta- 
tions, whatever they are, should be in a 
straight line drawn the length of the page. 
The letter given below will illustrate what 
I have in mind with reference to abbre- 
viations and the indenting of paragraphs. 


Urbana, Illinois 
September 13, 1920 


Mr. Ford E. Belt 
Lyndon, Illinois 


Dear Mr. Belt: 

I would like to have you plan to 
work with a branch of our office during 
the registration days. It will be neces- 
sary for you to be present at a conference 
on Friday afternoon, September 17, with 


50 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


Mr. A. J. Schuettner, and to register on 
Saturday afternoon, September 18. 

I wish you would write to me at 
once as to whether or not you can be with 
us at that time. I must have a reply 
from you not later than Thursday, Sep- 
tember 16. 

Very truly yours, 


Every one who writes should give at 
least a little attention to paragraphing. If 
the letter is written in longhand then the 
writer can manage this matter entirely as 
he wishes; if it is a dictated letter then 
the stenographer will need to exercise a 
little judgment in indicating by para- 
graphing when one topic ends and another 
one begins. A good many men who are 
careful as to their paragraph structure 
suggest to the stenographer as they are 
giving their dictation the beginnings and 
endings of paragraphs. The change of 
manner or the intonation of the voice is 
usually, however, sufficient indication to 
the stenographer. Some writers make al- 
most every sentence of their letters into 
a separate paragraph, thinking that by 
this method they secure a greater emphasis. 
The real facts are that by so separating 

51 


U. OF ILL. LIB. 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


their ideas they weaken their style and 
fail to secure emphasis at all. An entire 
typewritten page, on the other hand, with- 
out breaks, is jumbled and confusing. 
Such a page is less clear and definite than 
a broken page. Paragraphs in the ordi- 
nary letter should probably not exceed one 
hundred or one hundred and fifty words; 
otherwise the appearance is heavy. 

There are conventional ways of begin- 
ning and closing all sorts of letters, and 
these we cannot ordinarily with safety 
deviate from materially. We are coming 
gradually to be more direct, less formal 
and more natural and human, perhaps, in 
the use of these forms, than we once were. 
Written speech has always been a little 
more studied, a little less natural than 
spoken. It is likely to continue so, I im- 
agine, though the difference is gradually 
being minimized. Our grandfathers be- 
gan their letters ‘Respected Sir and 
Friend” capitalizing everything in sight, 
and ended them, even when they had to 
do with the most trivial subjects discussed 
with the most ordinary readers, “Your 
Humble and Obedient Servant.” We don’t 
do it that way now; we seldom go so far 

52 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


in these days as to sign ourselves “Re- 
spectfully yours,” to any one. 

Which leads me to say that a consid- 
erable number of people who have given 
indications in other directions at least of 
being intelligent sign their letters ‘Very 
respectively yours.” How one could be 
“respectively” anyone’s unless he were a 
firm or a board or a dual personality of 
some sort is too much for me to under- 
stand. It is not surprising, however, that 
high school boys and country storekeepers 
make the mistake when one runs onto it 
sometimes in the letters of college grad- 
uates. 

The conventional beginnings and end- 
ings of letters, like all idioms, should sel- 
dom if ever be taken literally. When 
we say “How do you do?” to a friend 
as we pass him on the street we have no 
thought that he will halt and give us a 
detailed account of his mental and physi- 
cal processes. It is in most cases purely a 
conventional form of recognition and 
greeting requiring no specific reply. So, 
too, when we begin a business letter with 
“Dear Sir’ or a social one with “My dear 
Miss Jarvis,” the recipients are not justi- 

53 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


fied in feeling that either of these forms 
of address suggests any warmth of per- 
sonal affection. One must begin some 
way, and these are simply the conventional 
forms which polite society approves, and 
which we are supposed to follow. 

“How are ye this marnin’, Mrs. Mc- 
Ginnis?”’ one Irishwoman greeted another 
over the back fence, “Not that I give a 
hang but just to start the talk.” And in 
a similar manner, then, conventional be- 
ginnings and endings are simply to start 
and end the talk contained in letters. 

A business letter addressed to a firm 
should begin “‘Gentlemen,” or “Dear Sirs,” 
or “My dear Sirs,” the last being the most 
friendly. If addressing a business letter 
to an individual one may say “Dear Sir,” 
“My dear Sir,’ or even “My dear Mr. 
Snyder.” These forms are given in the 
order of their formality, the last one 
being the most friendly and the least 
formal, and a form which may very 
properly be used, which should be used, 
in fact, when men who are transacting 
business with each other are acquainted. 
If the two men are very close friends 
they may even in a business letter 

54 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


address each other by their first names, as 
“My dear George.” These complimen- 
tary beginnings excepting when they in- 
clude proper names should in most cases 
have the first and last words only capital- 
ized. Such a complimentary beginning is 
usually preceded by the name and address 
of the one to whom the letter is written, 
as in the following letter. 


Ames, Iowa, 
January 19, 1921. 


Dean Thomas A. Clark, 
Dean of Men, 
University of Illinois, 
Urbana, Illinois. 


My dear Dean Clark: 

In your letter to me in reply to 
certain questions asked, you made men- 
tion of the fact that you have a Student 
Council which I understand from your 
letter handles cases involving misde- 
meanors of various kinds. Would you 
be kind enough to send me one of your 
pamphlets setting forth the selection, or- 
ganization, and work of the committee 
mentioned. I will appreciate it very 
greatly. 

Very truly yours, 


55 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


In the above letter, if it is thought best, 
the punctuation may be omitted from the 
ends of the lines. This method of punc- 
tuating is called the “‘open” method. 

No one who has any knowledge of con- 
ventional forms now ever begins a letter 
“Sir,” or “Mr. Jones,” or ‘Friend Smith,” 
or “Dear Friend.” There is no special 
reason for this excepting that people who 
establish conventional forms do not do it, 
and one is considered “green” or inex- 
perienced if he thus begins a letter. 

The complimentary close of a business 
letter should be, ‘“Truly yours,” or ““Yours 
truly,” or “Very truly yours,” or “Yours 
very truly,” only the first word in any 
case being capitalized. Occasionally still 
we see, when an inferior officer is address- 
ing a superior one, when a young man is 
writing to an old one, or when for any 
reason there is desire or cause for acknowl- 
edging or suggesting respect, the compli- 
mentary closing of a letter “Respectfully 
yours,” or “Very respectfully yours.” 
This ending is in good form only when 
the business relations between the persons 
are such as to inspire the feelings indicated 
by the word “‘respectfully,” and this rela- 

56 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


tion does not commonly occur. It is 
never permissible to close with ‘“‘Yours” 
or any single word. ‘The letter below, 
written by a junior in college is in about 
as bad form as could be devised by an 
intelligent person who had tried to think 
out all possible violations of good form. 
The abbreviations are inconsistent, both 
complimentary beginning and ending are 
wrong, the punctuation is faulty, two 
sentences are without subjects, and the in- 
dentations are irregular and unbalanced, 
giving the letter a top-heavy, unstable 
eneceeelt is perfectly clear what the 
writer means, but the whole letter has a 
sloppy, illiterate appearance, and makes a 
bad effect. If given a chance to explain, 
the writer would undoubtedly say that he 
knew better, but that he had the mumps, 
was in a hurry to get his communication 
into the mail, and gave very little thought 
or attention excepting to the facts con- 
tained in it. The only answer to this is 
that we shall all have to do a great many 
things in a hurry during our lives, and we 
might just as well begin immediately to 
learn to do things both rapidly and accu- 
rately. 
57 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


Jan. 13-1921 
Tuscola, Illinois 
Dean T. A. Clark 
University of Ill. 
Urbana, Ills 
Dean Clark, 

Came home 
the week end of Jan. 8 and was unable 
to return to school because of the mumps. 
Do not know just when I can get back. 
This letter is so that my absence from 
classes may be taken care of thru your 
office. 

Yours 


The friendly or social letter should have 
a considerably different form from the 
business letter. It should taboo abbrevia- 
tions entirely, it should be written on plain 
stationery such as has been already sug- 
gested, and it should begin and end differ- 
ently from the business letter. The 
complimentary beginning should be ‘Dear 
Mr. Green” or “Dear Walter,’ as the 
closeness of the relationship decides. 
There is little if any difference between 
“My dear Grace’? and ‘‘Dear Grace,” 
some authors holding that one form and 
some that the other is the more formal. I 

58 





MATERIALS AND FORM 


think it is a matter of paying your money 
and taking your choice. It is never cor- 
rect to begin a letter “Mr. Babcock,” or 
“Friend MHarrington,” or even “Dear 
Friend” ; such forms are as unconventional 
and as unsophisticated as saying, “Mr. 
Brown, meet Mr. Jones,” when introduc- 
ing one man to another. Inexperienced 
people use such forms because they ap- 
pear more friendly than the more con- 
ventional forms; old people use them be- 
cause that was the custom when they were 
young. These last we can justify. If the 
address of the one to whom it is written is 
included it should not be placed at the be- 
ginning of the letter as is regularly done 
in business correspondence, but in the 
lower left-hand corner of the sheet, at the 
close of the letter. If it is not desired 
to include such an address at all, and there 
is no good reason why it should be in- 
cluded so far as I can see, then the letter . 
may begin at once with the complimentary 
introduction and may give the date and 
place of writing in the lower left-hand 
corner at the end of the letter. The two 
letters below will sufficiently illustrate 
what J have in mind. 
59 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


Dear Miss Brown: 

I have just read in the morning 
paper the notice of your recent good for- 
tune in winning a scholarship at Bryn 
Mawr College. I congratulate you on 
the good fight you made, and assure you 
that I am more than pleased that you 
should have this opportunity to continue 
your education. 

With all good wishes, I am 

Very sincerely yours, 

MAUDE STRAIGHT CARMAN 


Urbana, Illinois 
January 26, 1921 


Minonk, Illinois 
January 25, 1921 
My dear Anton: 

I want to thank you for sending 
me the book concerning which I wrote 
you. I really needed it very much, and 
there was apparently no other way for 
me to get it but by bothering you. I hope 
it will not be long until you can visit us 
again. We miss you very much. 

Sincerely yours, 
James A. BLAINE 
Mr. Anton J. Janata 
218 North Central Avenue 
Chicago, Illinois 
60 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


A married woman in signing her name 
to a letter addressed to any one excepting 
her most intimate friends should indicate 
the fact that she is married. She should 
sign her own name, as “Elizabeth B. 
Jones,”’ followed by her husband’s name 
(Mrs. John L.) in parentheses. 

Any woman, married or single, should 
in some way indicate the fact of her sex, 
when writing to strangers, either by sign- 
ing her name in full or giving at least one 
full given name, as ‘Edith L. White” or 
“Mary Jane Gray,” and by prefixing 
““Miss” or “Mrs.” in parentheses. It is 
usually confusing and often leads to em- 
barrassing situations for a woman to sign 
merely her initials, as “M. L. Brown,” 
in her business correspondence, or in cor- 
respondence with strangers. Women are 
not yet so regularly and familiarly ad- 
dressed in business nor does their corre- 
spondence so unerringly show the femi- 
nine touch as to reveal their sex in cor- 
respondence without a little mechanical 
help. 

What came very nearly being for me an 
epistolary tragedy not long ago arose from 
the fact that I had received a business 

61 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


communication from a lady who erron- 
eously imagined that our acquaintance was 
sufficiently close for me to recognize her 
signature in any guise. She signed her 
name merely with her initials, and not hav- 
ing any very definite impression of her, I, 
thoughtless man, addressed my letter in 
reply to “Dear Mr. Brown,” not recogniz- 
ing my fair correspondent. My inexcus- 
able blunder brought down upon me a 
shower of vigorous criticism and impreca- 
tions that would have done credit to any 
masculine correspondent with whom I 
have ever done business. ‘The experience 
taught me a lesson which I am eager to 
pass on to all of those who may read this 
book. 

The matter of directing the envelope 
may seem trivial, but the neatly addressed 
envelope may often very favorably dis- 
pose the reader toward the writer even 
before he has taken the letter into his hand. 
It is the little things of life which often 
make a more lasting and definite impres- 
sion upon us than do the larger and ap- 
parently more vital things. The address 
on an envelope should always occupy a 
little more than the lower half of the 

62 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


available space, and should be placed to- 
ward the right end of that space. It will 
usually consist of but three or four lines, 
and these may be correctly arranged in 
one of two ways. The first of these is 
called the block method of arrangement. 
In this arrangement the lines are placed 
one under the other without indentation, 
and usually all punctuation is omitted, al- 
though regular punctuation may be used 
if it is desired. An illustration follows: 


Mr. Frank William Scott 
806 West Michigan Avenue 
Urbana, Illinois 


The second method is the more com- 
monly employed. In this the first line of 
the address is placed very near the middle 
of the space indicated and the succeeding 
lines are evenly indented toward the right. 
The lines should not be indented so far as 
to give an unsupported or top-heavy effect 
to the address. This address may or may 
not be punctuated, as the writer prefers. 


Miss Mary Louise Brown, 
927 Minerva Street, 
Chicago, Illinois. 
63 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


When in writing a letter one uses single 
sheets it is always better to write on but 
one side of the paper. It sometimes seems 
like a waste of good stationery to do this, 
but the ease of handling and of reading 
the letter, and the generally better effect 
of it all more than compensates for the 
seeming extravagance. A folded sheet of 
four pages is written upon in various ways 
so that it comes to be almost a matter of 
individual taste as to the order in which 
the pages shall come. One almost has to 
learn a new method of procedure with each 
new correspondent. If a suitable margin 
were left there is no reason why in writ- 
ing on folded sheets we should not write 
straight across successive pages taking 
pages one, two, three, and four as they 
come. When no margins are left, as is 
frequently the case though it should not 
be, the lines on adjacent pages are likely 
to run into each other in a rather confus- 
ing way. The most common method em- 
ployed is to write first across the narrow 
way of page one, to turn to page four next 
and write across it in the same way, and 
then to open the sheet and write upon 
pages two and three in a direction at right 

64 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


angles to the lines on pages one and four. 
This would bring the signature and the 
end of the letter on the side of page three 
as the folded sheet lies before you. There 
is no particular sense or reason in this 
method of procedure; it is a good deal like 
always having the bow on the left side of 
one’s hat, or a mourning band on one’s 
left sleeve, but it is nevertheless a custom 
from which it is not wise to deviate. 

One should always be careful with his 
signature. I say this with the more feel- 
ing knowing that my own must be a great 
trial to many people to whom IJ write and 
who have never before heard of me. Per- 
haps the military method of signing the 
letter over the typewritten name might be 
a good system to employ in all business 
letters. It is, in fact, being employed 
very much more generally in recent years 
than it was before the war, and it is a 
practice which may well be encouraged. 
In social letters, however, written in long- 
hand, there is no such opportunity and 
here special care should be observed. Even 
in letters between friends it is not a bad 
practice to sign one’s full name and to do 
it carefully. At Christmas time I spend 

65 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


not a few moments in racking my brain 
to determine who “E. E. F.” is or in 
deciding whether ‘“‘Mac” is McEldowney, 
or McMasters, or McGinnis. Sometimes 
even the envelope when it bears a deciph- 
erable postmark, which is seldom, does not 
help me out a great deal, for one’s young 
friends move without announcement from 
New York to Seattle, or from St. Louis 
to Cheyenne. Some men take pride in the 
cultivation of a signature that can neither 
be imitated nor deciphered. This fact 
may protect them from forgery, but it 
often occasions those to whom they write 
considerable annoyance, and is no sign 
either of erudition or of solid business 
standing. No one can afford so to sign 
his name unless it is printed or engraved 
at the top of the sheet upon which he is 
writing. 

I have said nothing about punctuation, 
and it is, perhaps, unnecessary to say much. 
The tendency these days is toward sim- 
plicity in punctuation and in capitaliza- 
tion. This does not mean, however, that 
one can wander on interminably without 
any punctuation marks, or that proper 
nouns may not still claim the right te be 

66 


MATERIALS AND FORM 


dignified with a capital letter. In short 
sentences, such as are commonly met with 
in ordinary correspondence, very little 
punctuation is needed. In longer sen- 
tences, however, or in the reproduction of 
conversation, considerable punctuation is 
required for the sake of accuracy and clear- 
ness. If one knows anything about the 
grammatical construction of sentences, this 
punctuation is not difficult to learn, and 
if one does not it is practically hopeless 
to give directions, for in such a case the 
writer will continue to use punctuation 
marks as a college student goes to church 
—when he feels like it. 

The various details with reference to 
materials and mechanical form to which 
I have called attention in this chapter go 
far to the making of a good-looking letter. 
Their use gives a pleasing appearance and 
an impression that the writer of the letter 
is familiar with the ways of the world and 
that he is a person of experience and good 
taste. They may be easily learned if one 
is willing to give a little attention to them, 
It is surprising how soon they may become 
habitual, and after they are habitual they 
seemed a real part of oneself. 

67 


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THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


“A great many people keep their friends 
in mind by writing to them,” says Booth 
Tarkington in the Guest of Quesnay, “but 
more do not.” ‘Friendships grow dull,” 
Jowett writes to Margot Asquith, “if two 
persons do not care to write to one an- 
other.” 

I presume that the friendly letter is the 
one most commonly written, because peo- 
ple of all ages from nine to ninety write 
friendly letters, and I suppose, too, that 
it is the sort which we most commonly 
intend to write and then don’t. The 
thought is disturbing me as I am writing 
this paragraph that I had promised my- 
self today to write two friendly letters 
that should have gone yesterday and that 
Tam afraid may not get off until tomorrow. 
The friendly letter is the most satisfactory 
sort of all, for it does not hold the writer 
to so rigid a routine, it is more flexible and 
less exacting in its requirements. Ordi- 
narily it need not be written today; its 
composition may be deferred until tomor- 
row or next week, or to that pleasant and 
indefinite future when we plan to accom- 

70 





THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


plish all things worthy and worth while; 
it is the letter we write because it gives us 
pleasure to do so, or more likely because 
we hope to give some one else pleasure. 

Sometimes, in cases of acute emotion, 
when the writers are in love for example 
or imagine they are, the friendly letter is 
a matter of daily occurrence and goes to 
great lengths; but this high fever of 
friendship ordinarily reaches an early crisis 
and soon burns itself out. The more re- 
strained it is, the more likely it is to be 
permanent. Friendly correspondence is in 
general, however, desultory, irregular, and 
for that reason often the more interesting 
because the arrival of the letter is un- 
looked for and unexpected. Once a 
month or once a year or every once in a 
while usually tells the story of the friendly 
letter. Such a correspondence is, as it 
should be, like the irregular meeting of 
friends whose paths do not regularly cross 
and who find keener pleasure in their oc- 
casional comings together. The occasional 
letter, like absence, tends to make the 
heart grow fonder. 

The form of the friendly letter is like 
that of the letter of courtesy. It omits 

71 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


from the beginning the street and the city 
address of the one to whom it is written; 
it eliminates, whenever possible or con- 
venient, both in form and materials every- 
thing that would suggest the business let- 
ter, because it really does not concern itself 
with business. I say advisedly “whenever 
possible or convenient,’ because some- 
times friendly letters are written in hotels 
or during business hours when a lull in the 
rush of business matters gives one a few 
minutes of leisure which may be occupied 
in friendly converse, with the materials at 
hand, just as one often makes a friendly 
call in his business dress not having either 
the time or the opportunity to put on the 
togs specified by the style book for such 
occasions. Many business men, and other 
people in fact, keep at hand various sorts 
of stationery to meet such social and busi- 
ness situations as may arise, but the aver- 
age man does not make such provision, 
and takes liberties with social conventions 
when he is writing to his old friends and 
uses whatever materials are handiest. It 
is, however, only between intimate friends, 
who have known each other a good while, 
that such negligé in correspondence is per- 
72 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


missible, or under other extraordinary cir- 
cumstances. 

In the friendly letter the person written 
to may be addressed, should be addressed in 
fact, as he would be spoken to in ordinary 
conversation when the correspondents are 
face to face. ‘‘Dear Bill,” ‘““Dear Doctor 
Brown,” “My darling child,” will go ina 
friendly letter if these are the terms ordi- 
narily employed, and the signature may 
follow equally familiar lines. It is quite 
permissible to use a nickname; I still con- 
tinue to address an old classmate, who oc- 
cupies a most important and dignified 
position in real life, as ‘“Face”—a name 
attached to him in college because nature 
had given him a very plain physiognomy. 
I am myself generally known by my 
initials or as “Tommy.” It is well to 
keep in mind, however, that conservatism 
is always wisest in letter-writing. 

It is safest never to write in a letter any- 
thing that would embarrass either corre- 
spondent or cause difficulty or regret if the 
letter should fall into other hands than 
those for which it was intended. Written 
secrets are dangerous. If it is necessary for 
you to say to your friend, “Burn this letter 

73 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


after you have read it,’ it is just as well 
usually to burn it before it is sent and be- 
fore anyone else has had a chance to read 
it. People generally are pretty careless 
with their correspondence, and it is safe 
to conclude that most letters, no matter 
how confidential they are assumed to be, 
fall into the hands of more than one per- 
son. Things that involve the good char- 
acter or the exemplary conduct of a third 
person, particularly private things, things 
that are vulgar or sentimental, or that are 
purely personal gossip, are better avoided. 
Such things are difficult to retract when 
they have been written, and they are often 
quite as difficult and embarrassing to face, 
when, as is often the case, we are forced 
to do so. I have seen enough of such 
letters picked up by curious landladies, 
and inquisitive relatives, and prying ac- 
quaintances and sent back to trouble the 
writer, to realize how humiliating they 
may sometimes become. 

The complimentary close of a friendly 
letter should usually be the conventional 
“Sincerely yours,” ‘Cordially yours,” or 
even ‘“‘Lovingly yours” if that is the way 
_you feel about it. The unusual ending 
74 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


may be used only when the relationship 
between the two people concerned is un- 
conventional or unusually friendly and 
familiar. In such cases the writer may 
close in any way that seems to him fitting. 
To close a letter in these days with “Your 
friend” is not considered quite good form, 
though there is no reason that any intelli- 
gent person can give why it should not 
be so. Everything that has been previ- 
ously said concerning sentence structure, 
paragraphing, good' grammar, abbrevia- 
tions, and similar details holds for the 
friendly letter. There is as much reason 
why we should be careful of form and 
detail in writing to our friends as in writ- 
ing to anyone else in the world, just as a 
proper husband feels under obligations to 
show his wife the same courtesy and 
thoughtfulness as he accords to other 
women. One should not neglect to show 
a man consideration and courtesy just be- 
cause he is one’s friend. 

The purpose of friendly letters is to 
interest our friends, to keep in touch with 
them, and to keep alive the warm feelings 
which first awakened the friendship. To 
accomplish this we must tell them what 

75 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


they want most to know, and what they 
usually want to know most concerns our- 
selves. At the beginning of the recent 
war a young friend of mine accompanied 
one of the first American units to go to 
France. It was with considerable agita- 
tion and feeling that I saw him leave, and 
I waited with eagerness and impatience to 
receive his first letter. As the days passed 
I followed in my mind every detail of his 
progress. J saw him embark, I met all the 
new friends with whom he came in contact 
on the voyage, I felt all the excitement 
contingent upon the dangers which he en- 
countered on the sea, and IJ finally landed 
with him in France. I followed him to 
Paris over a not unfamiliar road, for I 
had been there two or three times myself, 
and I then waited to have him confirm all 
that I had imaginea. 

His first letter came within a month or 
so. He was having some difficulty with 
his credit, he told me; would I write his 
Chicago banker or call him up over the 
telephone and get the matter straightened 
out for him. He was uncertain just what 
he would get into or where he would be 
sent. There was not a word about the 

76 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


voyage or the friends we both knew who 
were on the boat with him, not a word 
about himself or his impressions of any- 
thing or anybody. He had apparently not 
thought of me or of any interest I might 
have in him. I was disappointed, dis- 
gusted almost, and I replied as briefly and 
in as business-like a way as he had written 
me and wounded his feelings badly by do- 
ing so. He wanted what he had not 
attempted to give me! If he ever had 
any real adventures during the two years 
he was gone, he never said so. He phi- 
losophized a good deal on the different 
points of view which he encountered in 
France, he wrote me the detailed results 
of his introspections, but he seldom told 
me anything which I really wanted to 
know, and so far as he responded to any- 
thing which I asked or said in my own 
letters to him he might never have re- 
ceived or read any one of them. His 
letters were philosophical essays, not in 
any sense correspondence. 

Another young fellow to whom I write 
at very irregular intervals makes a quite 
different impression upon me. His let- 
ters are very personal, and no matter how 

af 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


negligent he is about writing or how long 
delayed his replies are, I am always quite 
sure when I receive his letter that when 
he wrote it he had my last communication 
before him. He catches my subtlest joke, 
he responds to my mood, whatever it may 
have been, as surely as he would have done 
were we together, and my slightest inquiry 
never goes unnoticed or unanswered. His 
letters seem to me almost as satisfying as 
if we were talking face to face. ‘The dif- 
ference hetween these two men was very 
little in temperament or in training; they 
were about the same age, they were edu- 
cated similarly; it was largely a matter of 
knowing how to write a letter, of appreci- 
ating what will interest and hold the at- 
tention of one’s friends. One kept his 
readers in mind when he was writing; the 
other thought very largely of his own 
personal feelings. 

First of all it is well to remember that 
when people of approximately the same 
age are writing to each other, unless their 
main interests are technical or professional, 
the thing they want most to hear about is 
each other’s movements. Protestations of 
love and undying friendship are all right 

78 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


for a time as a subject to dwell upon in 
friendly correspondence, but we are all 
more or less the slaves of everyday routine; 
the day’s work takes most of our time and 
thought, and before we have gone far in 
our friendly correspondence we begin to 
inquire, “What are you doing? Where 
are you going? What are you thinking 
about? What ambitions are stirring with- 
in you?’ The main thing that interests 
us in our friends is the routine of their 
everyday life and thought. 

A friend of mine not long ago read me 
a letter which she was about to send off 
to a mutual acquaintance. ‘You have 
told her nothing about yourself,” I said, 
“and you haven’t seen each other for 
years. She’ll like what you have said, but 
she would much rather hear about you and 
your home and your children and your 
varied interests, than to read the im- 
personal details with which you have filled 
your letter.” 

“But it seems conceited to talk about 
oneself all the time,” my friend replied. 
Well, so it may, but that is what our 
friends want unless it is for us to talk a 
little about themselves. 

79 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


We have all met people who, no matter 
how much of an effort we make to intro- 
duce a new topic of conversation, continu- 
ally cling to their own. You say some- 
thing about your summer’s experience, but 
they continue to discuss their housemaid’s 
eccentricities; you ask a question, but they 
ignore it, and wander on recounting their 
own domestic trials, or discoursing on 
their own personal experiences. There is 
no one more exasperating than this sort 
of person in friendly correspondence. You 
introduce a topic, you throw out a sug- 
gestion, or you ask a question in your 
letter, but your topic is never taken up in 
his reply, your suggestion is never fol- 
lowed, your question is entirely ignored. 
It is all as if he had never received or 
read your letter. The result is disheart- 
ening. When you answer a friendly let- 
ter, it is safest to have it before you, to 
have re-read it before you begin the reply, 
and in imagination, at least, to have a 
little conversation with the individual to 
whom you are writing. As you recall his 
manner, his tricks of conversation, his 
facial expression, you will respond to these 
as if he were before you. And conversa- 

80 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


tion both in writing and in oral discourse 
involves an interchange of thoughts. Some 
people have the erroneous idea that it is 
sufficient if one person does all the talk- 
ing while the other simply listens, but this 
is not conversation, it is only monologue. 

A real and satisfying reply to a friendly 
letter requires that all the questions be 
answered in some way or another, we sel- 
dom ask them simply to fill space; that 
there be a sympathetic response to sugges- 
tions, and an understanding and an 
appreciation of the tone and spirit in 
which the first letter was written. Other- 
wise there is no incentive or inspiration to 
continue the correspondence. ‘Have you 
read ‘Main Street’ ?”’ I ask when I am writ- 
ing Cornish, ‘‘and what do you think of 
it? It seems to me to have eliminated 
from the lives of its characters everything 
that is sweet and kindly and wholesome. 
It is true in every detail and yet false in 
that it omits so much that is also quite as 
true as what is presented.” I wait for his 
reply, eager to get his point of view, for I 
know he is a keen critic, and that he is 
quite unlikely to agree with me, but when 
it comes he makes no reference to my in- 

81 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


quiry. He has forgotten my question or 
has possibly never read my letter through. 
I am disappointed; I feel slighted as I 
might if I had attempted to take part in 
a conversation and had been totally 
ignored or crowded out of the talk. 

The friendly letter should avoid formal- 
ity and stiffness in style. It should be 
natural and conversational in its use of 
words, for in reality at its best it is only 
a conversation on paper. Contractions 
and elisions and the easy vernacular of 
everyday speech are not only permissible 
but quite desirable. Some letters I receive 
are as formal as a mathematical theorem 
or as the explanation of a new scien- 
tific fact. The friendly letter should be full 
of ‘‘aren’t’s” and ‘‘don’t’s” and “‘haven’t’s 
and ‘“‘shan’t’s” and the thousand and 
one contractions that give naturalness 
and movement to friendly conversation. 
There are many colloquial words and ex- 
pressions sometimes closely related to 
slang which might not pass muster in a 
formal essay or even in dignified spoken 
discourse but which would be quite unob- 
jectionable and even commendable in a 
friendly letter. 

82 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


Lamb knew how to write a friendly 
letter. His were usually longer than most 
of us will today take the time to write, 
but they were so genuine, so unstudied, 
so free from conventional cant, so humanly 
like the man who wrote them. The fol- 
lowing letter to his old friend Barron 
Field illustrates almost everything that is 
good in a friendly letter: 


My dear Barron: 

The bearer of this let- 
ter so far across the seas is Mr. Lawrey, 
who comes out to you as a missionary, 
and whom I have been strongly impor- 
tuned to recommend to you as a most 
worthy creature by Mr. Fenwick, a very 
old, honest friend of mine; of whom, if 
my memory does not deceive me, you have 
had some knowledge heretofore as editor 
of the Statesman; a man of talent, and 
patriotic, If you can show him any 
facilities in his arduous undertaking, you 
will oblige us much. Well, and how 
does the land of thieves use you? and 
how do you pass your time, in your extra- 
judicial intervals? Going about the 
streets with a lantern, like Diogenes, 
looking for an honest man? You may 
look long enough, I fancy. Do give me 

83 





WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


some notion of the manners of the in- 
habitants where you are. They don’t 
thieve all day long do they? No human 
property could stand such continuous bat- 
tery. And what do thev do when they 
an’t stealing? 

Have you got a theatre? What pieces 
are performed? Shakspeare’s, I suppose; 
not so much for the poetry, as for his 
having once been in danger of leaving 
his country on account of certain “small 
déer.” 

Have you poets among you? Damn’d 
plagiarists, I fancy, if you have any. I 
would not trust an idea, or a pocket-hand- 
kerchief of mine, among ’em. You are 
almost competent to answer Lord Bacon’s 
problem, whether a nation of atheists can 
subsist together. You are practically in 
one: 


“So thievish *tis, that the eighth 
commandment itself 
Scarce seemeth there to be.” 


Our old honest world goes on with little 

perceptible variation. Of course you 

have heard of poor Mitchell’s death, and 

that G. Dyer is one of Lord Stanhope’s 

residuaries. I am afraid he has not 

touched much of the residue yet. He is 
84 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


positively as lean as Cassius. Barnes is 
going to Demerara, or Essequibo, I am 
not quite certain which. Alsager is 
turned actor. He came out in genteel 
comedy at Cheltenham this season, and 
has hopes of a London engagement. 

For my own history I am just in the 
same spot, doing the same thing, (vide- 
licet, little or nothing,) as when you left 
me; only I have positive hopes that I 
shall be able to conquer that inveterate 
habit of smoking which you may remem- 
ber I indulged in. I think of making a 
beginning this evening, viz. Sunday, 31st 
Aug., 1817, not Wednesday, 2nd Feb., 
1818, as it will be perhaps when you 
read this for the first time. ‘There is the 
difficulty of writing from one end of the 
globe (hemispheres I call ’em) to an- 
other! Why, half the truths I have sent 
you in this letter will become lies before 
they reach you, and some of the lies 
(which I have mixed for variety’s sake, 
and to exercise your judgment in the find- 
ing of them out) may be turned into sad 
‘realities before you shall be called upon to 
detect them. Such are the defects of going 
by different chronologies. Your “now’’ is 
not my “now”; and again, your “then” 
is not my “then”; but my “now” may be 

85 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


your “then,” and vice versa. Whose 
head is competent to these things? 

How does Mrs. Field get on in her 
geography? Does she know where she 
is by this time? I am not sure sometimes 
you are not in another planet; but then 
I don’t like to ask Capt. Burney, or any 
of those that know any thing about it, 
for fear of exposing my ignorance. 

Our kindest remembrances, however, 
to Mrs. F., if she will accept of reminis- 
cences from another planet, or at least 
another hemisphere. 

Cine 


People of different ages and different 
experiences are interested in different 
things. Children are interested in adven- 
tures, in things which show surprise, which 
call for courage or which bring one into 
contact with personal danger. If there 
is a touch of sentiment or romance in it, 
so much the more will it please the young 
girl. If it involves personal encounters 
with wild animals, rivalry in sport, or 
hairbreadth escapes from death, it fascin- 
ates the boy. There is nothing like a 
painted Indian or a grizzly bear, a cata- 
mount or a jaguar to stir up interest when 

86 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


writing to a boy. I don’t really know 
just what a jaguar is, but I know he is 
interesting and dangerous. ‘Things mean 
more to a boy than do people. No one 
recognized this fact better than Theodore 
Roosevelt, and he has utilized it to a most 
interesting degree in his letters to his chil- 
dren. It is about dogs and horses and 
bobcats and other delightful animals that 
he constantly writes. One becomes ac- 
quainted with his dogs as if they were 
people with human characteristics and 
human feelings. Turk, the bloodhound, 
and “the pig named Maude” who went 
about the camp picking up scraps, and 
Skip, and Jack, are all like characters in a 
story book. As we read on through the 
letters we look eagerly for the reappearance 
of the familiar names as, I am sure, the 
Roosevelt children did while they were 
waiting for the coming of their father’s 
next letter. 

Men in active life are usually interested 
in business and sports and sometimes in 
politics, and these things should be kept 
in mind when writing to them in a friendly 
way. Their own particular business inter- 
ests them more than does any other man’s. 

87 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


If you are writing to a farmer it is better to 
discuss crops and live stock and the prices 
of pork and other farm products than it 
is to ramble on concerning fashions and 
foulard, as if your friend were running a 
ladies’ furnishing shop. His interests 
and tastes must always be considered. 
Women are fondest of personal gossip. 
They are more concerned with people than 
with things. Their time is taken up 
normally with the details of home life 
and association with their neighbors, and it 
is these that they dwell most upon in their 
letters. Intimate things are to them most 
interesting and most vital. Here is a 
Christmas letter, full of appreciation, 
cheerful, happy, and delightfully frank 
and personal. It makes one eager for the 
next one. It isn’t written by Lamb or 
Stevenson or even by Charlotte Bronté, 
but just by a healthy, intelligent, friendly 
human being. 


Dearest Alice: 

I had your card this morning, 
and it was such a dear one that I came 
near shedding tears on my toast at the 
breakfast table. I am so sorry about 

88 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


your eye, and know that it must be a 
most miserable experience. I surely hope. 
it will be well in less than three months. 
I appreciate your writing at all. 

I took your package to Wilming- 
ton with me, and did not waste any time 
in opening it on Christmas morning. 
Your gifts are always a delight, and I do 
a lot of bragging because Tom has a 
hand in them. I love this blue one, and 
my ‘face and fancy” are entirely suited. 
It is perfect on mahogany, and I have 
had a brown fruit basket on it, and to-day 
tried a blue bowl with a gay flowered 
rim, the blue in the bowl being just a 
shade deeper. I look with wonder and 
admiration upon the intricacies of that 
edge. 

Are you wondering at the change 
in our address? I should have told you 
before about our adventures in house- 
keeping. We sold our house in August, 
and are living in an apartment until we 
can find a house we like better. We are 
on the first floor and have a back porch 
and a lawn and plenty of room and the 
cat, and I like it so well that I am not 
even thinking about a house at present. 

Roger is in Rochester for a year 
as chemist in the Eastman Research lab- 


89 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


oratory and returns to Hopkins in the 
fall for three years for his Ph.D. Richard 
is in his second year in Engineering, but 
is greatly interested in printing. Little 
A. K. is eight years old and goes to 
Friends’ School. Arthur goes on fre- 
quent business trips, and you may see him 
one of these days. We are within two 
blocks of the University, so Richard 
leaves at eight twenty-nine for his eight 
thirty class. 

Arthur is deep in ‘‘The Beloved 
Vagabond,’—do you and Tom adore 
“Aristide Pujol?’ The boys had fits over 
it. And have you read any of Chris- 
topher Morley’s books? I thought ‘“Par- 
nassus on Wheels’ was great, and have 
read some of ‘“‘Shandygaft.”’ 

I am so glad you had a fine 
Christmas. Arthur gave me a banjo 
clock which he got at Ovington’s when 
he was in New York just before Christ- 
mas, and a lamp for my dressing table. 
We all went to Wilmington as Father 
has not been well, and did not feel like 
leaving home. My sister lives in Char- 
lotte, North Carolina, and has a darling 
baby a year old whom we call “Little 
Liz” to distinguish her from grand- 
mother. ‘The family history being now 


go 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


concluded, I send you a kiss, and a Happy 
New Year, and two good eyes. 
Having a new letter from you, 
I will tear up the one I had last year. 
Loving you, as ever, 
REBECCA 
January 4, 1921. 


People who are past their youth are 
fondest of reminiscence. The days of 
their childhood linger most tenderly in 
their memories. The friends with whom 
they went to school, the roads they trav- 
eled in boyhood, the scenes of early ad- 
venture when they were young and strong, 
have for them the keenest interest. Walter 
Nicholson wrote me not many months 
ago. We lived “across the section” from 
each other when we were children, just a 
mile apart, and we were together regu- 
larly. We have not seen or heard much 
of each other since we were eighteen, I 
think, and his home is hundreds of miles 
from mine. The letter is full of refer- 
ences to “Prairie Star’ and “Kentucky” 
school houses, to spelling bees and revival 
meetings. Where are all the old fellows, 
he wants to know: Ves Byers, and Taylor 
Curtis, and the Gregory boys? And what 

g!I 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


has become of the Baily girls? What 
hilarious times we used to have with them. 
So he rambled on, recalling old experi- 
ences and bringing back old memories. 
It was an interesting and delightful letter 
which made me feel young again, when I 
was able to forget how many years had 
intervened since we had walked together 
across the prairies or driven along the 
flower-bordered roads. It was unconscious 
art which gave him the power to re-create 
in my mind the vivid pictures of my young 
manhood. 

Sometimes we may take for granted 
that our friends will be interested in the 
same things in which we find interest, but 
not always. It is safest, before we begin 
to write the friendly letter, to study the 
epistle to which we are making a reply, 
and then to give some serious considera- 
tion to the personal interests, to the likes 
and dislikes of the one to whom we are 
writing. Writing a friendly letter is like 
starting a conversation with a friend. 
There are a thousand things about which 
we might write. We should not write 
that which is most pleasing to us, but that 
which is likely to be most interesting to 

Q2 


THE FRIENDLY LETTER 


him. That is the secret well worth your 
learning, of the effective friendly letter. 





FORMAL NOTES 


FORMAL NOTES 


My sister Virginia was giving a dinner, 
and she asked me to help her write the 
invitations. For several reasons the in- 
vitations were to be written and not en- 
graved. Virginia is a stickler for social 
conventions and for thoroughly good form, 
so she couldn’t have them printed, for 
both she and I knew that that would sug- 
gest that we are common and vulgar and 
inexperienced in social affairs; only those 
who are ignorant of what is done by the 
most careful people, or those who choose 
for the sake of haste or economy to ignore 
social conventions, ever have their calling 
cards or their invitations printed. There 
was not time to have them engraved, for 
Virginia had decided rather hastily to give 
the dinner, she could secure the caterer 
only upon a certain night, and she knew 
that she would have to give her guests ten 
days in which to reply to her invitation 
and to get their feathers preened up. The 
written invitation is quite as good form 
as is the engraved one, and so, as I said, 
my sister decided to write her invitations, 
and she asked me to help her. 

96 


FORMAL NOTES 


It was to be a thoroughly nice dinner 
and a good-sized one. The guests com- 
prised the best people of the town, that 
is the most experienced socially, the most 
refined, the best educated. It was no com- 
mon country village in which Virginia 
lived, but a college town where culture 
and literary taste flourished, so we were 
justified in supposing that everything 
would be done both by the hostess and her 
guests in the most conventional form. 

The invitation was written in ¢he recog- 
nized form which such invitations are 
supposed to follow. We used Virginia’s 
correspondence cards with her monogram 
stamped in gold in one corner. The writ- 
ing was carefully placed on the card with 
wide margins so as to give the best possi- 
ble suggestion of care and thoughtful 
arrangement. Such things count for more 
than most persons suppose. ‘The card 
read: 


Miss Virginia Gale requests the 
pleasure of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert 
Hoover’s company at dinner on 
Wednesday evening May the eleventh 
at seven o’clock, Cosmos Club, 
Locust and Olive Streets. 


97 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


They were all mailed promptly, and 
then we waited for the replies—formal 
replies they should have been, written in 
the third person and couched in the same 
direct language as had been employed in 
the invitation. 

“How is your dinner coming on?’ I 
asked Virginia three days later when she 
had had ample time to hear from every 
one. She smiled in reply and showed me 
a little pile of envelopes. Now every one 
knows who has had any experience or who 
has thought about it at all that a formal 
invitation should have an immediate re- 
ply; especially is this true of an invitation 
to dinner. The hostess must know exactly 
how many guests she is to entertain, she 
must prepare her menu, and arrange her 
tables, and decide upon the seating of her 
guests. Otherwise she will offend some 
one or her dinner will be a higgledy- 
piggledy affair without order or definite 
arrangement, and that was not the sort of 
dinner that Virginia was planning to give. 

I took the envelopes in my hand, less 
than a dozen of them, and looked them 
over. They were of all shades and sizes, 
pink, lavender, cream, and yellow; there 

98 


FORMAL NOTES 


were business envelopes with bold printed 
return cards in the corner, and there were 
envelopes so tiny as to suggest the an- 
nouncement of a birth. The acknowledg- 
ments were equally bizarre. Mrs. Turner 
—her husband received a doctor’s degree 
from Yale and teaches English—began 
her note “Dear Friend’ and signed it 
“Yours Truly” with two capital letters, 
not being satisfied to make one error only 
in her complimentary close. Bob Bates, 
whom I had always looked upon as a shin- 
ing example of what one ought to do and 
be in social affairs, wrote a rather crude 
informal note and used the stationery 
designed for the business operations of his 
uncle Ed’s hardware store. Miss Eleanor 
Pratt, whose father is president of one of 
our local banks and who herself is a grad- 
uate of a most widely advertised girls’ 
finishing school, affirmed that “Miss Pratt 
regrets that owing to a previous engage- 
ment, she wé//] be unable to accept,” etc., 
instead of saying as she really meant that 
she zs unable to do so. Not a third of 
those invited had replied and only Mr. 
Scott’s note was in actually perfect form, 
the only form which could correctly be 
99 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


used, in fact. His stationery was beauti- 
fully simple and refined, with his street 
number embossed in dark blue at the top. 
His penmanship was even and regular and 
the note was carefully placed in the middle 
of the folded sheet. The indentations 
and the margins were very pleasing to the 
eye. When you saw the envelope, even 
before you took the card into your hand, 
you recognized the fact that Mr. Scott is 
a gentleman who knows social conventions 
and who follows them punctiliously. 


Mr. Scott accepts with pleasure 
Miss Virginia Gale’s invitation to 
dinner, at seven o’clock on the eve- 
ning of the eleventh of May. 


The acknowledgments came straggling 
in until the day of the dinner. Some of 
those invited called up on the telephone 
at the last moment and declined or ac- 
cepted, one or two sent word by friends, 
and in sheer desperation Virginia called up 
others to find out whether or not they 
were coming, explaining her action on the 
ground that she was afraid her own notes 
had gone astray in an uncertain mail. In 
one way or another she heard from the 

100 


FORMAL NOTES 


most of her guests before the hour set for 
the meal. Mrs. Barnes, sensitive though 
absent-minded, arrived without either 
having accepted or declined her invitation, 
it appearing later that she thought she 
really had accepted. ‘Three days after the 
dinner had been given a tardy note of 
apology was received from Dr. Earle in 
which he explained that the arrival of 
some friends from Seattle just at the time 
Miss Gale’s note came had entirely driven 
the matter of her dinner out of his mind, 
and he had just that morning come upon 
it while straightening up his desk. He 
trusted that his seeming neglect had not 
caused Virginia any undue annoyance. 

We kept all the acknowledgments, 
varied and many-colored as they were, and 
looked them over, after the dinner was a 
thing of the past, and commented on them. 
There was considerable food for thought 
in the little pile of envelopes and in the 
collection of bizarre notes which they con- 
tained. 

“If these people,” Virginia said to me, 
“who have been to boarding schools and 
college, who have traveled in every civil- 
ized country in the world and in some un- 

IOI 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


civilized ones, who are the social leaders 
in an uncommonly cultivated and educated 
community, are as ignorant and as care- 
less of social forms and conventions as my 
guests were, don’t you think you ought to 
write something for the education of 
young people and the general public with 
reference to these matters?” 

“T believe I will,” I replied. And that 
explains why I am giving such-specific in- — 
formation and directions in this chapter. 
I remember very little that I learned in 
college, a condition not uncommon I im- 
agine, but one of the things I do recall was 
said by my professor of English. 

“In explaining anything to a general 
audience you should remember that they 
are always more ignorant than you think.” 
If I err, then, in this direction, blame it 
on my early teaching. 

Every one receives formal notes at one 
time or another even if he does not ac- 
knowledge them, for a large percentage of 
such communications are for one reason or 
another—carelessness, or indifference, or 
ignorance, or the delay which makes it 
unnecessary to do so many things in life 
—not answered or acknowledged at all. 

I02 





FORMAL NOTES 


There are announcements of births and 
deaths, engagements and marriages; there 
are invitations to weddings and dinners, 
and there is for the writer of these notes 
a correct form to be used and for the re- 
cipient something to be said or done and a 
proper time and a proper method of say- 
ing or doing it. 

The formal note of invitation or an- 
nouncement should be written or engraved. 
There is no more logical reason why it 
should not be printed than there is why 
one should not eat with his knife or keep 
his hat on in the house. Children used 
to be told that there was a danger of cut- 
ting themselves if they ate with their 
knives, but there is equal danger of wound- 
ing themselves with the prongs of a fork. 
There is really no reason why we should 
not eat with our knives excepting a con- 
ventional one. It is not the custom; re- 
fined people generally in English-speaking 
countries do not do it; and there is an end 
of the matter. The same thing is true of 
the printed announcement or invitation or 
calling card. It shows a lack of social ex- 
perience, unacquaintance with careful so- 
cial forms, it suggests the common and the 

103 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


vulgar. You ask why? There is no 
reason. People with the widest social ex- 
perience and the best breeding just don’t 
do it that way, and that is all. 

It is in quite good form to omit titles 
in the formal note and call every man 
plain ‘Mister’ though the one who does 
this will sometimes give offense to judges 
and doctors of medicine, and to military 
officials, who commonly adhere very 
closely to the titles to which they can 
legitimately lay claim. A friend of mine, 
a high college official, was introduced by a 
physician as “Mr. Jones” though he was 
entitled to be called ‘‘Dean,’’ but when he 
in turn introduced the physician as “Mr. 
Brown,” he was corrected by the medicine 
man and reminded that he was ‘‘Doctor 
Brown.” It is well, therefore, to keep 
these points in mind, for though it is 
never discreditable or discourteous to call 
any ordinary man “Mister,” yet some men 
will not like it; and more women will ob- 
ject if their husband’s titles are not recog- 
nized. If you ignore the convention, you 
must not be annoyed if some people think 
you do not belong in the first class. 

It is a general custom in formal notes 

104 


FORMAL NOTES 


when names are used to write them in full. 
It is better to say, ““Mr. and Mrs. James 
Brown Scott” than “Mr. and Mrs. James 
B. Scott.”” We can properly write ‘Mr. 
and Mrs. Scott” if their identity is suffi- 
ciently clear to warrant the omission of 
the surnames, but it is not good form to 
use initials only, as “Mr. and Mrs. J. B. 
Scott.” Such a method is too business- 
like and suggests haste and lack of care. 

The formal note is written in the third 
person throughout as: 


Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Phillips re- 
quest the pleasure of Miss Julia 
Marlowe’s company at dinner on 
Wednesday evening, June twenty- 
seventh, at seven o’clock. Woodbine 
Cottage, 1110 West Illinois Street, 
Urbana, Illinois. 


If the persons concerned all live in the 
same city, only the street number need be 
given at the end of the note, and in cases 
of intimacy even that may be omitted. 

In the engraved invitation it is not al- 
ways so easy to adhere strictly to the third 
person throughout the note. In this coun- 
try at least, the engraved invitation 

105 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


commonly changes to the second person in 
order to avoid the writing in of the name 
of the one invited, and so follows some- 
thing of a mongrel method. Such an in- 
vitation reads as follows: 


Mr. and Mrs. David McConoughey 
request the honor of your presence 
at the marriage of their daughter 
Elizabeth to Mr. Robert Rea Brown 
on Saturday evening the twentieth 
of November at eight o’clock. Cen- 
tral Presbyterian Church, Montclair, 
New Jersey. 


Here the invitation uses the pronoun 
“your” to apply to any one to whom the 
invitation may be addressed instead of in- 
cluding the name of each specific individ- 
ual invited. 

In England the third person would be 
strictly adhered to whether the invitation 
were written or engraved, and would 
read: 


Mr. and Mrs. Walter Williams re- 

quest the pleasure of Miss Althea 

Marsh’s company at luncheon on 

Tuesday January the eleventh at one 

o’clock. 302 West Hill Street. 
106 


FORMAL NOTES 


A blank space would be left in the en- 
graved note for writing in the name ‘‘Miss 
Althea Marsh.”? Such a procedure seems, 
perhaps, finical or overparticular for an 
American, and it is seldom followed, 
though if we want to be punctiliously cor- 
tect we should follow it. 

In general in such notes most punc- 
tuation 1s omitted excepting the period 
following abbreviations, and no abbrevia- 
tions should be used excepting the most 
conventional ones, like ‘‘Mr.”’ and ‘‘Mrs.”’ 

The better the materials used in the 
writing of any note, or in an engraved 
note, the more favorable impression will 
be made, and this is especially true of the 
formal note. ‘Tinted paper, unless it be 
gray, is in very questionable taste; white 
is always the safest; pink and lavender 
are, I think, most commonplace and vul- 
gar. They suggest the child or the rustic. 
Double sheets of note paper of any adult 
conventional size or correspondence cards 
approximately three and one-half by five 
and one-half inches of thoroughly good 
quality are the most appropriate materials 
to be used in writing such notes, and re- 
fined people commonly use only black ink. 

107 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


The paper or the cards may bear the 
writer’s monogram or coat of arms or an 
embossed street address. The envelopes 
should fit the paper once folded and 
should be of the same quality as the paper. 
This last specification should go without 
saying, I suppose, but I have seen so many 
instances where it did not do so, that I 
hesitate to let the matter pass without ad- 
ditional emphasis or comment. 

The formal note of invitation should 
always have a formal acknowledgment, 
and there is but one general form. The 
specific choice of nouns and adjectives may 
be varied to suit the emotions or the tem- 
perament of the individual, but the form 
is the same. You can be “charmed” or 
“delighted” or ‘“‘very much pleased’ to 
accept an invitation as the mood or the 
circumstance strikes you; you can “regret” 
with any adverb attached that pleases you, 
but you should not vary from a set ar- 
rangement and order. If you must decline 
an invitation, it is not good form to say 
that you ‘will be unable to accept” the 
invitation, but that you ‘are unable.” 
The present tense is always the correct 
one, as for instance: 

108 


» 





FORMAL NOTES 


Mr. Frank King Robeson very much 
regrets that owing to an enforced 
absence from the city, he is unable 
to accept Mr. and Mrs. George Ben- 
nett’s invitation to dinner on Tues- 
day evening the ninth of June at 
seven o'clock. 


There are so many varieties of formal 
notes and announcements that one is some- 
times at a loss to know just what he ought 
to do or say. I find in the morning mail 
various formal announcements. George 
Ward, an old friend of mine, has gone 
into partnership with some one in Spokane, 
and he wants me to know it; Randolph 
Eide and his wife have a new baby, and 
a little card gives me the information; 
John Honens is going to be married to 
Elizabeth Butler, whom I have never met, 
and her parents, with whom, also, I am 
unacquainted, invite me to the wedding; 
Betty Crawford has been married to a 
man I have never before heard of, and her 
parents announce the wedding. What 
should I do in each of these several cases? 

The first note is simply for my infor- 
mation and does not demand an acknowl- 
edgment, though if I am polite and 

109 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


interested, as I should be, I may’ write 
George informally and congratulate him 
upon his advancement and assure him that 
I am glad to know of his success. Cour- 
tesy and diplomacy both require that I 
should reply to the announcement of the 
baby’s birth. Parents expect a reply, for 
they are usually pretty sensitive regarding 
any lack of attention to their offspring 
and resent any slights or neglect in that 
direction more even than they would if 
these were directed toward themselves. 
Such announcements, however, should 
bear somewhere an address to which an 
acknowledgment may be sent, and in 
most cases which come under my notice 
do not do so. I shall have to write Mr. 
and Mrs. Eide and tell them how lucky 
they are to have this young American to 
train and to spend their money on, and 
how much I envy them the opportunity. 
This note, also, will be an informal, one. 
The wedding invitation requires one note 
and admits of two others. I must accept 
or decline the invitation of the parents at 
once, and this must be done in a formal 
note addressed to them and similar to the 
invitation. I ought to write an informal 
IIo 


FORMAL NOTES 


note to John Honens congratulating him 
on his marriage and wishing him well, for 
I have known him all his life, he has done 
me the courtesy to recall our old friend- 
ship at the time of his approaching mar- 
riage, and it is to him I owe the pleasure 
of the invitation. I should be rather 
thoughtless and crude, and I should miss 
an opportunity to cement a very happy 
relationship, if I did not return his 
courtesy with a similar one. If I feel like 
making a little present to the newly 
formed household, this must be sent to the 
bride, and even though I do not know her, 
the fact that I am a near friend of her 
husband to be gives me the right to ad- 
dress her in an informal note and to say 
whatever pleasant and gracious things 
may come to my mind. If I do not wish 
to write her I may simply enclose my 
calling card with whatever I send. 

In general, then, every formal an- 
nouncement or invitation admits of an 
acknowledgment or requires one. The in- 
vitation should be accepted or declined on 
the day it is received. Such a procedure 
is only in justice to the hostess who must 
make specific preparation for the enter- 

III 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


tainment of her guests. If you are uncer- 
tain it is better to decline than to annoy 
her by holding up her plans for your con- 
venience. If you want to make friends, if 
you would like to gain a reputation for 
thoughtful courtesy and punctilious regard 
for social conventions, you will in some 
way acknowledge every formal note which 
you receive even if the conditions existing 
do not actually require such an acknowl- 
edgment, and you will do it with your own 
hand even though the stenographer is 
unoccupied while you are doing it, for the 
stenographer, useful and necessary as she 
is, is for purposes of business and not for 
social courtesy. 


II2 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


The business letter is not different from 
other sorts of letters excepting that it has 
a somewhat different purpose. It is not to 
amuse or to please or to show social cour- 
tesy; its object is to get things done, to 
present facts, to give information, or to 
ask for it. Its construction is logical and 
direct rather than imaginative. Its appeal 
is to the intellect and to the judgment 
rather than to the feelings or the emotions. 
“Business English,” about which so much 
has been said in recent years and about 
which books even have been written, is not 
a different genus of English from that em- 
ployed in any other form of prose dis- 
course. We should use the same forms of 
correct speech and the same _ sentence 
structure in doing business whether orally 
or in writing as we do in making love or 
in writing an essay or in giving an after- 
dinner speech, excepting that our approach 
and our rhetorical style should perhaps 
sometimes be different. 

In a business letter we should get at the 
thing on hand at once. This does not 
mean that in writing such a letter we 

114 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


should use the condensed method em- 
ployed in a telegram and by the omission 
of subjects, predicates, and articles at- 
tempt to say as much as we can in as few 
words as possible. It is as necessary in a 
business letter to use complete sentences 
with all their relationships made evident 
and with all their physical members in- 
tact, as it is in any other sort of letter. 
Terseness, directness are in no way synony- 
mous with the omission of vital and neces- 
sary parts of a sentence. 

“Would like catalog of your school,” a 
business man writes me. ‘‘Have son who 
is now in high school and will graduate in 
spring. Want him to take engineering 
course. Would like to know cost and pos- 
sibility of finding good lodging place for 
him, Yours’’ 

His communication resembles a night 
letter, kept punctiliously within the con- 
ventional fifty words as if he were making 
a strenuous effort to economize time and 
to reduce expense, rather than a business 
letter from an intelligent man who has 
something normal to say. Translated into 
English it would read: 


115 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


I should like to have you send 
me a catalog of your school. I have a 
son who is now in the high school and 
who will graduate in the spring. I want 
him to take an engineering course, and I 
should like to know how much it will 
cost and the possibility of finding a good 
lodging place for him. 

Very truly yours, 


Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Clarissa Bishop 
with reference to certain matters pertain- 
ing to the settlement of her estate is an 
admirable illustration of what a business 
letter should be like. It is personal and 
friendly; it does not waste a single word, 
its sentences are simple and complete, and 
it goes without circumlocution directly to 
the point. When you read it you know 
that it was written by a real man writing 
to a specific individual. 

“A friend of yours, Dr. Cheney, has 
been consulting me in your behalf about 
the estate of your late husband. It is not 
improbable that I shall pass through Le 
Roy next Sunday; and if I do, I will call 
to see you. 

“T understand your husband died with- 
out making a will and without any child; 

116 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


and if this is so, there is no doubt that 
you, as his widow, are entitled to half of 
his real estate and all his personal prop- 
erty, after the debts of the estate are paid. 
Give yourself no uneasiness about this 
whatever; and be tempted into no bar- 
gains or agreements, with interested par- 
ties, about this matter.” 

There is a pretty general feeling, also, 
that abbreviations, contractions, and fig- 
ures are not only admissible in a business 
letter, but that such a letter loses some- 
thing of its business-like character if they 
are not used. Certain texts on “Business 
English” would give this impression. Ab- 
breviations are most frequently an indica- 
tion of carelessness, or haste, or laziness. 
They have about the same effect upon the 
appearance of an otherwise good-looking 
business letter as a man who goes to a 
party and who wears no coat. The writer 
gets on more quickly, but the effect of their 
use is seldom a pleasing one. The only 
advantage in using figures instead of 
words in any letter is that figures econo- 
mize space and appeal more directly to the 
eye than do numbers expressed in written 
words. Their appearance is not so good, 

117 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


and most careful writers do not now use 
them. Letters written by business men 
who have given thoughtful attention .to 
form, are not marred by sentences with- 
out subjects and verbs, and are remarkably 
free from all sorts of abbreviations. Brev- 
ity 1s a quality which should be sought, 
but it is not dependent upon the omission 
of necessary elements of a sentence, or 
upon the regular use of abbreviations; it 
is attained by the elimination of unneces- 
sary details and superfluous qualifying 
phrases. Directness is a very essential 
quality in a business letter. When one 
means ‘“‘no” it 1s just as well to say it at 
once. 

“Goshen College has applied for admis- 
sion to the North Central Association of 
Colleges and Secondary Schools,” I wrote 
a University president a few years ago, 
‘“‘and the executive committee of the As- 
sociation, knowing that you are acquainted 
with both the standards of the Association 
and the equipment and curriculum of the 
College, would like to know if you think 
the College comes up to the requirements 
of the Association and if you are willing 
unqualifiedly to recommend its admission.” 

118 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


His reply came back in a few days as 
follows: 

“T have known President Cooke of 
Goshen College for many years and have 
the very highest regard for him. He and 
I were in college together, and have kept 
up our friendship ever since. He is a man 
of excellent training and of the highest 
ideals. Since going to Goshen he has re- 
organized its faculty and materially in- 
creased its endowment. He has the con- 
fidence and the respect of every one with 
whom he is associated, and his work and 
influence in building up the college have 
been extremely gratifying. He is in every 
way an excellent executive and a Chris- 
tian gentleman.”’ And so he rambled on 
for two pages. 

In acknowledging this letter I said, 
“Your personal relations with President 
Cooke of Goshen College, I gather from 
your letter which I have just received, 
have been very pleasant, and your testi- 
monial as to his character and his work 
at the college I find interesting. What I 
want to get, however, is a direct statement 
as to whether you think the college is at 
the present time meeting the requirements 

IIQ 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


laid down by the North Central Associa- 
tion and if you would recommend its im- 
mediate admission.” In his next letter, 
which consisted of four lines, he said that 
he was sorry to have to say that he must 
answer “no” to both of my _ queries. 
Through indirectness, in his first letter, he 
was attempting to evade my questions and 
to have me draw an entirely false conclu- 
sion. He knew what was true, but he 
wanted to evade the responsibility of stat- 
ing the truth; he hoped so to disguise the 
truth that it might appear in a more favor- 
able light than if baldly stated. The same 
effect is often attained when the writer 
is in doubt as to just what he wants to say. 
Like a speaker who has made no prelimi- 
nary preparation, he wanders on, hoping 
that by saying a good deal he will ulti- 
mately reach something that is direct and 
definite. 

One of the most skilful letter-writers 
whom I know always very carefully plans 
his letters before he begins to dictate them. 
When in his correspondence he comes upon 
a letter difficult to answer, he lets it go 
until the next day, takes it home with him 
at night, and writes out in direct and com- 

120 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


plete sentences the specific points he wants 
to make in his reply, very much as he was 
taught in college to prepare a formal brief 
for an argument. Then, when he is ready 
to dictate his letter or to write it out in 
longhand, he knows what he wants to 
say, and he gets at it without circumlocu- 
tion or delay. The man who carefully 
plans his letters before he begins to write 
them, especially if they are difficult, saves 
time, gains clearness, and says more in 
fewer words than one who rushes in un- 
prepared to tackle a difficult epistolary 
job. 

This last method of planning carefully 
before putting statements into cold type is 
especially to be commended if there is a 
possibility that what one says may be 
quoted, or passed from one person to an- 
other, or used finally as evidence. In such 
cases one can not be too careful in the 
expression of what one wants to say. 

Every business letter if possible should 
be complete in itself. It should show at 
once both the address of the writer and of 
the one to whom it is written. It should 
state the business with which it is con- 
cerned briefly and clearly. It should not 

I2I 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


be necessary to see the envelope in which 
the letter came or, excepting in unusual 
circumstances, to refer back to previous 
correspondence to get at the facts essential 
to the answering of the letter in hand. 
The references to the subject under con- 
sideration should be accurate and full 
enough to require no further investigation 
or explanation. I have on my desk as | 
write these sentences a letter which I can 
by no possibility answer intelligently until 
I get further details. The writer’s refer- 
ence to the business under discussion is 
vague, and his previous correspondence, 
even when I have dug it out of the files, 
does not adequately disclose the signif- 
cance of the matters to which he refers 
in his last letter. If one has only a very 
limited correspondence, then he may 
reasonably be expected to carry in mind 
most of the details of what has been pre- 
viously said, but if his letters run from 
fifty to one hundred or five hundred a 
day and cover a wide range of topics the 
case is different. An illustration is before 
me. 

“Your letter with reference to my son’s 
scholastic record for the past semester is 

122 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


before me. Will you not please give me 
some explanation as to why he has done 
so badly and how I can help to improve 
conditions?” 

A woman’s name is signed to the letter, 
and it is a very common name. I go 
through all records of my office to find a 
son whose home address corresponds to 
the one the woman had given in her letter, 
but I can discover none. Then I search 
through the long list of delinquent 
students whose parents J have communi- 
cated with in recent weeks, and ultimately 
I find the man IJ am looking for and the 
reason for not discovering him more read- 
ily. His mother, interesting woman, has 
been married the second time, and the sec- 
ond husband’s name was different from the 
name of her first husband and conse- 
quently different from her son’s name. As 
she had written me once before she had 
supposed that IJ would recall this slight 
irregularity. The omission of the detail 
which she thought trifling, had, however, 
cost me the expenditure of a considerable 
amount of time and energy. When you 
read your business letter before you sign 
it, as you always should, make sure that 

123 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


what you have said will not need further 
investigation or explanation before it is 
clear to the man who is to receive it. 

I have learned nothing more fully dur- 
ing the years that I have done business 
with various sorts of people than that sur- 
prise or the unexpected is the most com- 
pelling influence one can use with people. 
If I call a student to my office to talk over 
things with him, he has worked out before 
he comes in all that I am going to say to 
him and what his defense is to be. If he 
has been derelict, he has an adequate ex- 
planation; if he has been absent from 
classes, he has a dozen legitimate excuses 
on his tongue’s end. My only hope of 
getting anywhere is to present my case in 
a way for which he is not prepared. A 
clever book salesman comes to see me once 
a year, and though IJ think before he makes 
his annual call that I am all steeled and 
set for him, I invariably fall, and yet he 
has never really asked me to buy. He 
studies my personal tastes, he lays his 
wares before me alluringly and always in 
a different manner from the one he em- 
ployed in any previous year. His coming 
fascinates me, for I am always anxious and 

124 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


interested to see what new method he will 
employ to get my trade. I am never fully 
prepared; he always surprises me; he is 
practically always too much for me. I 
think I have never been able to resist him 
but once. JI am wondering now what 
strategic move he will make next year. 

The same principle holds in writing 
business letters. In nothing else does 
originality, surprise, the unexpected count 
more toward bringing success, and in win- 
ning your correspondent over to your way 
of thinking. When you say what he ex- 
pects you to say, you are dull, and he gives 
little attention to your line of talk; when 
you spring the unexpected he wakes up 
and finds some interest in what you have 
to say. We are all prepared to meet the 
conventional; it is only when the unex- 
pected arises that we are taken off our 
guard. 

The father of a student who had failed 
wrote me a year or two ago. He is a 
business man in a city of some size in a 
neighboring state, and though he seems 
to know business, he doesn’t use the Eng- 
lish language with the accurate care one 
might desire. 

125 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


“Donald says he took French and 
passed his examination and that his 
teacher, hurrying off, lost his paper and he 
got no credit. If that’s true I don’t think 
much of your method of running a school 
after a pupil has done the work and paid 
the tuition. And you put him on proba- 
tion on failure of the teacher. It don’t 
look to me like a square deal, and I will 
give you a chance to explain before I take 
him out of school. Another study, Rhet- 
oric. He sprained his ankle and couldn’t 
be at the examinations. It looks to me 
- you could of given him an examination 
without putting him on probation. It. 
looks to me that if a teacher is any good he 
could of given him a grade on daily reci- 
tations. If he isn’t doing good work, why 
not? JI will not keep him in school a 
minute longer unless he is doing good 
work.” 

My answer was brief. I stated that the 
boy’s paper in French was not lost but 
that he had failed the final examination. 
He did have a sprained ankle, but this fact 
did not keep him away from his rhetoric 
test. He was behind in his assignments 
and would have failed even had he taken 

126 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


the test, and knowing this he did not go. 
His work at the present time, I said, was 
not good. If the father wished to with- 
draw his son, I suggested, that his own 
state university was an excellent institu- 
tion. ‘The tuition was somewhat higher 
than in our own, but the college was nearer 
his home and he might there find condi- 
tions and methods of instruction which 
would better satisfy him. I think my 
answer was not what he expected, though 
it must have been satisfactory to him, for 
he did not withdraw his son, and when 
later he visited him he called on me, and 
we had a very placid interview. 

A great many people seem to object to 
the use of the personal pronoun “IT” in 
business letters. J have never understood 
why, for it is as good a pronoun as there 
is in the language, and it expresses as clear 
and direct a meaning as any word in use. 
I have known men to go far out of their 
way to say “we” or “the writer’ when 
they really meant “I.” In addition to 
failing to say what they actually wanted 
to say, they lost a good deal in directness 
and in personal appeal. Of course, if one 
writes as the representative of a firm or a 

127 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


family it is quite right to say ‘“‘we,”’ but 
if it is the letter of one individual to an- 
other there is no adequate reason why the 
more personal “I’’ should not be used. It 
is self-consciousness or exaggerated mod- 
esty to want to conceal your personality 
by the use of general terms, and such use 
results in stiffness and formality. It is 
argued sometimes that in using “we”? the 
writer divides the responsibility for his 
statements, but he really deceives no one. 

In the friendly letter or the letter of 
courtesy there is almost always a close 
acquaintanceship or even an intimacy be- 
tween the correspondents which makes the 
immediate recognition of the writer of 
the letter concerned quite easy. Even 
if the penmanship is obscure or irregular 
the signature of the writer can always 
be deciphered without much difficulty. A 
very different situation, however, obtains 
as regards the business letter. A great 
many business letters come from persons 
one has never heard of before—persons 
whose names are strange and unfamiliar 
and almost impossible to decipher. Men 
often seem to torture their signatures into 
the most impossible hieroglyphics resem- 

128 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


bling in no way the characters which we 
were taught in the elementary schools. 
The reasons for this illegibility are some- 
times haste, sometimes carelessness, and 
often an attempt to form a signature that 
would be difficult to imitate or forge. 
Some of these signatures look more like a 
Chinese laundry bill than an attempt to 
write English script. I receive letters reg- 
ularly from a Boston attorney whose name 
appended to his communications does not 
show a single character which has any sem- 
blance to anything in the written alphabet 
in English; I have letters before me from 
a country banker and a Chicago business 
man that are as vague to me as the inscrip- 
tions of the Rosetta stone. It is only by 
referring to the names engraved at the top 
of the sheet that I am able even approxi- 
mately to guess what the characters are 
intended to represent. I have been told 
that my own signature often is not ‘much 
more intelligible. 

Unless a business man has his name 
printed or engraved somewhere upon his 
stationery he should write carefully 
enough for a stranger te recognize his 
name with a minimum of effort. Anyone 

120 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


can learn to write his name legibly if he 
will only take the time and the pains. It 
is conceit to suppose that one is so well 
known that his signature will be generally 
recognized no matter how illegibly writ- 
ten it may be. A great many people feel 
as I do about it, as is proved by the fol- 
lowing letter which came to my desk since © 
I began writing these paragraphs: 

“T am in receipt of a letter under date 
of March 23rd written on University of 
Illinois stationery, by a student in the 
University who is applying for a place as 
teacher. I am not able to decipher his or 
her name, and therefore, am writing to 
you. 

“The name looks as if it might be 
Arlone Tumley or Artoro Sumley. It may 
be that the letter is an ‘L’ or an ‘S’ or it 
may be intended for an ‘F’ and you may 
be able to find the name listed in your files. 
Please have this person write me again. 

“T am very sorry that a person applying 
for English work or for any position in 
the High School can not write well enough 
to be read.” So are we all, say I. 

It seems like a silly platitude to insist 
that business letters, more than other let- 

130 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


ters in fact, should be answered promptly. 
There should usually be some acknowledg- 
ment on the day on which the letter is 
received. Neglect and delay in answering 
important letters is a habit, which one can 
cultivate, like staying away from Church 
or sleeping late in the morning. There is 
little excuse for it but selfishness. Even 
if one’s business does not require that he 
keep a regular stenographer and makes it 
necessary for him to write his own letters, 
yet if he will have a place to keep his 
unanswered mail and a time for attending 
to it, the matter will become as regular as 
meals or as keeping his face washed, and it 
is in fact quite as important as either of 
these physical details. An unanswered 
business letter brands a man as careless 
and unreliable. 

There are a good many types of business 
letters, but the general style and form of 
each is about the same. If a printed or 
engraved letterhead is used, this will take 
care of a considerable number of details. 
It will ordinarily indicate the writer’s 
name, business, and business address, with 
a date line often partially filled in. The 
envelope in which it is mailed should carry 

131 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


a return card in one corner indicating the 
name and address of the writer so that the 
letter may be returned if it cannot be de- 
livered to the one to whom it is written. 
The return address should be written or 
printed on the front of the envelope and 
not on the back as it is done by some men 
and most women. ‘The letter given below 
is a Satisfactory illustration of the form 
and content of a good business letter and 
the envelope containing it: 


PHONE: GARFIELD 1702 


I. M. BILDERBACK 
DEALER IN 
DODGE BROTHERS MOTOR VEHICLES 
338-340 HICKORY STREET 
CHAMPAIGN, ILL. 


November 30, 1920. 


Mr. John L. Jones, 
Henry, Illinois. 


My dear Mr. Jones: 

Relative to our hasty conversa- 
tion of last evening in regard to an 
enclosed car, I wish to refer you to the 
enclosed statement which coincides pre- 
cisely with my views as to the automobile 
situation. First, I assure you that Dodge 
Brothers’ cars will not be reduced in 

132 





THE BUSINESS LETTER 


price. Next, I am able to procure cars 
at present, in fact am accumulating them 
as fast as my finances will permit. 

I have in stock at present a car 
which I believe will please you and the 
situation is as follows: I expect to carry 
some of the cars that I am receiving until 
March 1. With this in view, I will make 
you the following proposition. I will 
deliver you the car immediately and in 
settlement will take your personal note 
to March 1, without interest, or, if you 
prefer paying for it at this time, I will 
deduct interest at seven percent from the 
time of delivery to March 1. 

Inasmuch as your preference is a 
closed car, I assure you that winter driv- 
ing will be fully appreciated in one and 

with the above proposition you can have 
the use of both your money and the car. 

If you are interested I should 
be pleased to show you the car at vour 
home at any time. 

Very tru:y yours, 
I. M. BILDERBACK, 
Dodge Brothers Dealer. 
{MB:D 
Enclosure 


133 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


1. M. BILDERBACK 
DODGE BROTHERS MOTOR CARS 
338-340 HICKORY STREET 
CHAMPAIGN, ILL. 


Mr. John L. Jones, 


Henry, Illinois. 





If an enclosure accompanies the letter 
it should be mentioned in the body of the 
letter, and the word enclosure placed at 
the lower left-hand corner in order that 
whoever is responsible for placing the 
enclosure in the envelope may not be re- 
quired to read the whole letter in order to 
see what is required. Nothing is more 
annoying than to receive a letter which 
was supposed to contain a draft or a cir- 
cular or a sample of a textile or something 
or other and then find that the important 
enclosure has been omitted. “There ought 
t’ be a heavy penalty,’ Abe Martin says, 
“fer writin’ ‘enclosed find clippin’.’ and 
then not puttin’ th’ clippin’ in.” 

Very few business men do more than tc 
read and sign their letters after they have 

134 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


dictated them, and many letters, when the 
stenographer can be depended upon to 
write what one has said, are “dictated and 
not read.” A friend of mine signs his let- 
ters ‘read but not dictated,’ for the rea- 
son, he explains, that he likes to convey 
the impression that he is sufficiently inter- 
ested in his correspondence and his cor- 
respondents to give a little attention to 
both. There is a suggestion of insolence, 
of superiority, in the ‘‘dictated but not 
read’ that is irritating to not a few people. 
It is a question whether or not one should 
admit under his own signature that he 
thinks so little of the accuracy of what he 
has written that he is willing to let it go 
without verifying it. The one who re- 
ceives such a letter has the right to feel a 
little slighted, a little humiliated, and es- 
pecially so if the correspondence is of any 
especial importance. 

It is often very desirable that the writer 
of a letter should indicate his position or 
his title. If he is the secretary or the 
president of the firm, if he is pastor of the 
First Presbyterian Church, or director of 
the corporation he should indicate this fact 
below his signature. The importance of 

135 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


what one says is very often influenced 
largely by one’s position, and it is gener- 
ally wise to indicate this. 

Whatever the situation may be the tone 
of a business letter should always be cour- 
teous. ‘The customer is always right’ is 
a phrase pretty hard to live up to in many 
instances, but it is always wise to do so. 
No matter how sarcastic and scathing a 
letter may be, even if it approach the limit 
of insult, there is everything to be gained 
by keeping one’s self-possession, and ex- 
hibiting self-control. The most effective 
reply to such a letter is brevity, dignity, 
and courtesy. The man who will not be 
thrown off his guard and descend to dis- 
courtesy will ultimately win. 

A good many people feel that the gram- 
matical, carefully phrased letter with well- 
constructed sentences and correctly spelled 
words is essential only when doing busi- 
ness with the cultivated. I listened not 
long ago to a young college graduate of a 
middle west institution who was trying to 
impress me with the practical character 
of a set of books of which he was trying to 
dispose. He made all sorts of crude 
errors, his pronouns seldom revealed any 

136 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


correct relationships, and his verbs were 
tortured into the weirdest forms. 

“Why do you speak so murderously 
bad?’ I asked him when he gave me a 
chance to say something. 

“The ordinary vernacular always makes 
a hit with the ‘hicks,’ ” he replied, ‘‘and it 
takes me a while to readjust myself when 
I return to civilization.” 

I am sure his psychology is wrong, and 
that care and correctness in speech and in 
writing is more effective with even the un- 
trained and illiterate than is slovenly, 
careless, ungrammatical English. The 
neatest, tidiest letter is always the best 
one, no matter who receives it. 

In general all business letters are alike. 
They follow the same courteous dignified 
and impersonal tone. They are cast in 
the same mechanical form, they employ 
the same sort of stationery. As to the last, 
the better the quality and the more conser- 
vative the appearance the more effective 
it is. Cheap, flashy stationery advertises 
the writer himself as cheap and second- 
class. There are, however, certain types 
of business letters which are entitled to a 
separate and specific treatment. 

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WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


There is the letter of recommendation. 
Any one can accumulate a collection of 
letters of recommendation, and I would 
almost venture the statement that he can 
get any one he pleases to write them. The 
most of such letters that I have been 
privileged to read say little and say it 
badly. A letter of recommendation should 
tell the truth. Ministers and school teach- 
ers, IN my experience, write the worst 
ones and are most likely to show little 
respect for the principles of truth. They 
often injure rather than help the people 
whom they flagrantly praise by painting 
for them a character which it is impossible 
for even a saint in Heaven to live up to. 
When any one in a letter of recommenda- 
tion tells more than the truth, he does the 
person recommended a real damage; even 
the truth that he tells is eventually dis- 
credited. Such a letter need not be con- 
fined wholly to words of praise. When 
we recommend men we are talking about 
human beings who, as nearly perfect as 
they may be, must still have some quali- 
ties which might be improved upon. One 
gives the strongest impression of sincerity 
when one mentions the weaknesses as well 

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THE BUSINESS LETTER 


as the strong points of a person about 
whom he is writing. 

I recall that I won the everlasting en- 
mity of a young fellow at one time who 
got hold of a letter I had written about 
him in which I had said that he “lacked 
ageressiveness.” The young man argued 
that if he asked me to write about him I 
was under obligations to say only such 
things as would help him to get the posi- 
tion he desired or would be complimentary 
or creditable to him. If I could not say 
these things, he felt that I should not write 
at all. He was on the whole a good man, 
but he could not see that a frank truthful 
presentation of his qualities was more 
likely to help him along than a flattering 
untruthful description. Which leads me 
to say also that a letter of recommenda- 
tion is the property of the man to whom it 
is addressed. It is in the nature of a con- 
fidential statement from the writer to the 
one written to. It is discourtesy and a 
breach of confidence to put it, without the 
consent of the writer, into the hands of 
the one about whom it is written. 

When I have a man recommended to 
me I want to know something of his train- 

139 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


ing, his age, his experience, his character. 
If he has specially attractive qualities or 
traits, if he has special talents, if he is 
possessed of idiosyncrasies, I am glad to 
be prepared for these. It ought to be pos- 
sible to say something individual about 
any man, for no two of us are alike. “Mr. 
George Ward came to me directly from 
college and has been my secretary for three 
years,” wrote a friend of mine. “He is 
not so diplomatic at all times as I should 
wish, but he is dependable, he is loyal, he 
is intelligent, and he likes to work. I 
have never given him any piece of work to 
do, no matter how difficult, that he did not 
do well. It will give me no discomfort if 
he is willing to stay with me.” It was a 
good picture of an efficient man. Some- 
times one is asked to recommend a man 
for a position for which he seems to have 
no qualifications. The only reasonable 
thing to do in such a case is to tell the man 
that from your point of view he is not 
suited for the job that he is wanting to fill 
and that you can not conscientiously rec- 
ommend him. Such a course is the only 
way to be truthful and just to the em- 
ployer and his prospective employee. It 
140 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


takes courage to do it, but in the end it 
pays. 

I believe I have written more letters of 
recommendation than any other man liv- 
ing of my age, because the college student 
and the college graduate are persistently 
looking for a job where references are re- 
quired, and IJ have been a willing victim. 
Nearly every mail brings me in such 
requests, and yet I do not recall that many 
fellows have asked my permission to give 
my name as reference or have thanked me 
for the letter that I wrote. If you give a 
man as reference, the least you can do is 
to ask his permission beforehand or to an- 
nounce to him what you have done, and if 
you ask him to write a letter for you, the 
minimum compensation you can offer him 
is to thank him. 

Then there is the application for em- 
ployment, the attempt to get a job by 
mail. It isa rather delicate matter to blow 
one’s own horn effectively. There is al- 
ways the danger of sounding too faint a 
note and of not being heard over the foot- 
lights; there is the opposite difficulty to 
avoid of turning on too much wind and 
of overdoing the job. How much to say 

I4I 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


in one’s own behalf and how much to omit 
calls for a rare judgment. I have often 
asked men who have come to me for let- 
ters of recommendation to write out what 
they honestly thought could be said in 
commendation of themselves; but I have 
seldom had anyone who did it well. One 
man only I recall who wrote a discrimi- 
nating and satisfactory letter about him- 
self that I would have been willing to 
sign my name to and send out in the mails. 

Frankness is a good quality to reveal. 
If you have been well trained, if you have 
had some experience in the work which 
you are wanting to take up, if you are 
willing to work hard and to rest your 
advancement upon your ability to do the 
business, these are good things to say, and 
they are likely to make a fair impression 
upon the man who reads your letter. 
Most men who apply for a position offer 
little and ask a good deal. When you 
suggest, as they do in advertisements, that 
you are willing to rest your case upon your 
merits, that “the goods may be returned 
if not satisfactory,” you reveal a certain 
confidence and belief in your own powers 
and ability that will be sure to make an 

142 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


appeal. A reasonable confidence in your- 
self begets confidence on the part of others. 
If you have letters of recommendation it 
is well to enclose these, but it is better still 
to give references, since the letters that are 
enclosed, and which you have yourself 
seen, must of necessity be less frank and 
more guarded in their statements than one 
which is written directly to the employer 
concerned. Even though he tells the truth 
about you, the writer of a letter will do 
it in a very different way from what he 
would if he were sure you would never 
see the letter. 

The mechanical construction of the let- 
ter which you write and its appearance 
will have much to do in determining your 
success in winning attention and getting a 
job. Good form, legible penmanship, cor- 
rect spelling and sentence structure all 
have weight in settling your fate. I have 
known more than one appointment to turn 
upon a superfluous period or a misplaced 
comma or a misspelled word. These all 
seem trifles, but when the race is close, 
then the decision goes to the man whose 
attention to small details has been most 
punctilious. The same suggestions as I 

143 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


have just given apply in a large degree to 
a reply to an advertisement for help. A 
good letter in this case is like a good front 
page in a newspaper or a pleasing person- 
ality in a first acquaintance. 

There is another type of business letter 
which is so difficult to write courteously 
and in good temper that it usually proves 
too much for the inexperienced; that is the 
letter calling attention to an error and ask- 
ing that it be corrected. There is usually 
the indication of annoyance in such a let- 
ter, and the imputation that, if the error 
was not intentional, it was at least the 
result of inexcusable carelessness. I recall 
a very distressing error which I made dur- 
ing the epidemic of influenza in 1918. It 
was my daily task among a thousand oth- 
ers to send letters and telegrams to the 
parents of our undergraduates who were 
seriously ill in order that the home folks 
should be kept informed as to their con- 
dition. Late one evening the head nurse 
at the hospital telephoned me that Robert 
Reed was seriously ill and that I should 
write his parents. I asked the office to 
look up Reed’s home address and the name 
and address of his father, and I wrote 

144 


THE BUSINESS LETTER 


the letter. Then a few hours later I dis- 
covered that there were two Robert Reeds 
and that I had sent the disturbing letter 
to the wrong father. I hastily dispatched 
a telegram to the proper father and caught 
the other parents before they had time to 
get away from home. I had a letter from 
the first Mr. Reed in a few days which 
showed that he at least knew how grace- 
fully to accept the correction of an error. 
He was so thankful, he said, to find by my 
second message that his son was quite well, 
that he willingly overlooked my mistake 
which he understood was, under the cir- 
cumstances, quite an excusable one. [ 
have always remembered him as one of the 
real gentlemen with whom I have had to 
do business. 

One of the first things to keep in mind 
when a mistake has been made is that there 
is no likelihood of its having been inten- 
tionally made. Every one who makes mis- 
takes soon learns that he pays a heavy 
price usually for his error, so that he 
would rather be right than not. Any 
right-minded business man is willing at 
once to make his mistakes good, and usu- 
ally all that is necessary is to put the fact 

145 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


before him pleasantly, and he will do the 
rest. Unless we have never ourselves 
made mistakes we should not fly into a 
rage when other people do so. 

In the writing of any sort of business 
letter, and there are a great many special 
kinds which I have not mentioned, we 
should be helped in determining what line 
of procedure to follow if, for a moment, 
we attempted to put ourselves into the 
position of the man to whom we are writ- 
ing. It is largely a matter of psychology, 
of trying to understand how men’s minds 
work, how they are most easily affected, 
what appeals to them most. If we would 
study ourselves more carefully we should 
know better how to appeal to other men, 
for in a very large degree we are all alike. 


146 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


When I was a young fellow, just start- 
ing out into life, I came into daily contact 
with a man who had had a considerable 
experience with all sorts of people as a 
professional man and as a politician. He 
was shrewd, business-like, and, by those 
who did not know him very well, was 
considered cold and calculating—a man 
who would not be likely to do anything for 
a purely emotional reason; and yet from 
him I learned the effectiveness and influ- 
ence of the letter of courtesy. I mean by 
this phrase the letter written not in reply 
to another letter nor yet to elicit a reply 
of any sort, but simply as an act of polite- 
ness and thoughtfulness to acknowledge a 
kindness or an obligation or to let one’s 
friends or acquaintances know that one was 
aware of their sorrows and their successes, 
of their comings and goings, and that one 
had a real personal interest in these. It 
is the sort of letter that one is seldom 
under obligations to write, but if it is writ- 
ten at all it must be done at the opportune 
moment. Dawson never seemed to let a 
chance go by to write such a letter. If a 

148 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


friend of his was elected to office or re- 
ceived any recognition or promotion for 
efficient service Dawson was the first to 
acknowledge the fact with a letter of con- 
eratulation. Marriages and births and 
anniversaries of all sorts never went un- 
noticed by him. It made little difference 
who the person concerned was; he might 
be the leading citizen or the son of a wash 
woman, but if he were in trouble, or had 
accomplished something creditable, or was 
in any way in the public eye, he was sure 
to get a line from Dawson written with 
his own hand on the beautiful stationery 
in the green ink which was with him a 
fad in correspondence. 

When Ralph Roberts lost his life in a 
railroad accident, though Dawson was a 
thousand miles away and had really 
known the boy very slightly, he was the 
first to write the family and to express his 
sorrow at the son’s unfortunate death; and 
I recall with what pride the father showed 
the letter to his friends and what comfort 
it brought to the broken mother. When 
George Mills won the two-mile race at 
the Western Conference Meet, Dawson 
was the first man to see the notice in a New 

149 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


York paper and to write George a letter 
which gave him the greatest delight, and 
which he will keep among his treasures as 
long as he lives. I used to wonder often 
how he found time to do it, but when I 
spoke to him about the matter he said, “A 
man can always find time to do what he 
really wants to do, and nothing I do gives 
me more pleasure and satisfaction and 
influence, I suppose, than to write these 
letters. They bind me to the friends I 
have, and I know they make more friends 
for me.” 

Few of these letters were ever answered, 
for the letter of courtesy is the sort that 
people are glad to receive, that they intend 
to acknowledge, but seldom do. It took 
me a long time to reconcile these two facts. 
When I began to follow Dawson’s example 
and write letters of congratulation and sym- 
pathy and encouragement to my friends I 
was disappointed when they did not reply 
and was about to conclude that the letters 
gave little pleasure and the effort of writ- 
ing them was not worth while. One day a 
stranger from a little town a hundred 
miles or so away dropped into my office 
on a matter of business. 

150 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


“I have heard a good deal about you,” 
he said, “from a young fellow in my town 
by the name of Wrenn.” 

“What does Jennie have to say about 
me?’ I asked, curious as we all are when 
our names are mentioned, and trying to 
recall what I had done to Wrenn. 

“Well, you wrote him a letter once 
when he knocked a home run or won a 
foot race, or something of that sort, when 
he was in college, and he never tires of 
talking about you and of showing the let- 
ter to people in the town; and he says he 
wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for it.” 

The boy had never indicated to me that 
my letter had brought him any pleasure. 
I would willingly write another for half 
of what he says he considers the first one 
worth, but I determined if such a little 
thing as writing a letter would bring a 
boy pleasure through so many years, I 
should continue the practice. 

Another friend of mine, who has 
learned the importance and the possibili- 
ties of this sort of letter-writing, keeps his. 
writing materials at hand in his study and 
makes it a point almost every morning 
before he goes to his office to write a 

151 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


friendly or a complimentary note or two. 
If he has talked to a discouraged boy the 
day previous he tries to brace him up; 
if he has seen a loafer, he endeavors to 
stimulate him, and wherever he recognizes 
an opportunity for giving pleasure or com- 
fort or helpful advice he seizes it and 
writes the effective word. He realizes, as 
not all of us have come to do, that the 
written word is more permanent in its 
effects than is the spoken word, for what 
is spoken we may forget when the sound 
is out of our ears, but whatever is written 
may be recalled to our memory at will. 

I receive every Christmas a great many 
remembrances from the people I have met 
in various parts of the world, from the 
students whom, during the last twenty-five 
years, I have taught in the University, 
from young people whom I have encour- 
aged or advised or disciplined or helped 
in some way, but I receive nothing that 
gives me so much pleasure as the unsolic- 
ited friendly note that stirs recollections 
and brings good wishes. And it is such 
an easy thing to write. 

Lincoln knew the importance of such a 
letter, and he knew how to write it when 

152 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


occasion demanded. His letter to Mrs. 
Bixby is one of the most dignified as well 
as tenderest in the English language. 


Dear Madam: 

I have been shown in the files 
of the War Department a statement of 
the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts 
that you are the mother of five sons 
who have died gloriously on the field of 
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless 
must be any word of mine which should 
attempt to beguile you from the grief of 
a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot 
refrain from tendering you the con- 
solation that may be found in the thanks 
of the Republic they died to save. I 
pray that our Heavenly Father may 
assuage the anguish of your bereavement, 
and leave you only the cherished memory 
of the loved and lost, and the solemn 
pride that must be yours to have laid so 
costly a sacrifice upon the altar of free- 
dom. 

Yours very sincerely and respect- 
fully, 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 


Some letters of courtesy we are under 
obligations to write. A friend whom I 
153 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


met yesterday in an unfamiliar city took 
me out to his house to dinner and spent 
half the afternoon in contributing to my 
comfort and pleasure. I should be crude 
indeed if when I arrived home I did not 
send him a note of thanks for his unselfish 
kindness. A group of young fellows sent 
me a box of flowers when I was ill a short 
time ago; I should be classed among the 
heathen and the barbarians if I did not, 
as soon as I was able, make some written 
acknowledgment of their thoughtfulness. 
Any personal attention or courtesy which 
we are shown, any special obligation which 
we may incur, we may well recognize and 
acknowledge in writing. If a friend gets 
us out of a hole or goes bail for us when 
we are in jail, the least we can do to show 
our gratitude is to thank him; and yet, as I 
now recall it, the last young fellow I saved 
from jail gave me the impression that he 
was doing me a personal favor by allow- 
ing me to assume the responsibility. I 
have heard from his parents, but from 
him I have never had a line. Too often 
this is the case, but it is really the man 
who neglects to write who in the end is 
the sufferer. 
154 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


“I wonder if Fred will write us?’ I 
queried one morning after a recent guest 
had left us. He was no special friend of 
ours, but we had taken him in and looked 
after him for a week when he was stop- 
ping in our town. He had had a good bed 
and better meals than I am accustomed to 
have when we are not entertaining com- 
pany. He had sat by our cheerful open 
fire in the evenings and had his breakfast 
served in the morning when it pleased him 
to come down. 

“Probably not,’ my wife answered, 
“they usually don’t, and, besides, Fred 
is young and selfish.” 

I knew that he meant to write; I knew 
equally well that he knew he ought to 
write; but he didn’t do it. We never had 
a word from him. I met him on the street 
a year later when [ was in Kansas City. 

“T shall never forget that good time 
you gave me when I was at your house a 
year ago,” he said, “I meant to write to 
you, but—” It was the conventional rea- 
son, and I said nothing in reply. 

Why don’t people do it? As I have 
suggested in another chapter, some are 
ignorant, they have never been taught at 

155 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


home or in the schools just how such 
things should be handled. Others are lazy 
and selfish. They have got out of the in- 
cident all of the personal pleasure or profit 
available, and they see no particular rea- 
son why they should put themselves to 
any trouble to acknowledge the courtesy 
or to give the other fellow pleasure. They 
are like the young man to whom I lent 
fifty dollars a few months ago to get him 
out of a financial embarrassment. He re- 
turned it long after the time agreed upon 
with the statement, ‘Well, here’s your 
money; and if you knew how nearly I 
came to not paying it at all you’d think 
yourself lucky to get it.” There was no 
gratitude on his part; he was rather dis- 
gruntled because he was expected to keep 
his obligation at all. There are those who 
procrastinate until the time is past when 
it 1s opportune to write such a note; and 
some have no facility in composition; they 
are so self-conscious and inexperienced as 
not to know just what to say, so they say 
nothing. 

Such notes should always be informal; 
they are friendly and personal, and they 
should take on a friendly personal exte- 

156 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


tior. This means that they should be 
written in longhand whenever time and 
circumstances will at all permit. The 
typewritten note inevitably suggests the 
turning out of quantities of notes of a 
similar character. J remember at a time 
of little leisure a few years ago dictating 
some personal notes to undergraduates 
whose excellent scholastic standing had 
warranted recognition. It was a case of 
doing it in this way or not doing it at all. 

“I want to thank you,” one of the men 
wrote me in acknowledging the note, ‘‘for 
the letter of congratulation which I re- 
ceived. Notwithstanding the fact that the 
writing of such notes is probably a matter 
of regular routine taken care of by the 
clerks in your office, yet I am pleased to be 
included in one of a small group which is 
worthy of special recognition.” 

He saw nothing personal or individual 
in my typewritten letter, though it was 
different from those sent to the other men, 
and I was not sure that I could blame him 
for so thinking. He saw it only as a form 
letter sent out whenever occasion war- 
ranted. I should have found time to write 
it by hand as I have since tried to do. 

157 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


In other respects also the earmarks of 
a business letter should be eliminated in 
the note of courtesy. One of two forms 
may be used—a form used commonly in 
informal military correspondence or a still 
more informal form. The two illustra- 
tions below will make clear what I mean. 


5449 Greenwood Avenue, 
Chicago, Illinois, 
March 17, 1921. 
Dear Frank: 

This morning’s Tvibune con- 
tained the announcement that you have 
just been made a member of the firm for 
which you have been working since you 
left college. This is a quick recognition 
of your worth, and I am sure shows that 
you have been as attentive to duty since 
you got out of college as you were while 
an undergraduate. I congratulate you 
and the firm that has been lucky enough 
to get you. I am sure that what you have 
done in the past is a true indication of 
what you will accomplish in the future. 

Sincerely yours, 

JoHN WaTSoNn 
To 
Mr. Frank Turner, 
Ancona, Illinois. 
158 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


Usually in such a note as I have given 
above the street address is engraved upon 
the stationery and only the date need be 
written in; sometimes only the initials of 
the writer form a monogram at the top 
of the sheet. The writer’s taste deter- 
mines this. The second form of note omits 
the date and the written address at the be- 
ginning and starts with the complimen- 
tary introduction. 


Dear Mrs. Bryan: 

The announcement of Robert’s 
death was a great shock to all of us and 
filled us with sorrow and regret. Mr. 
Stewart and I recall with pleasure our 
intimate relations with him last summer 
at Estes Park. There never was a more 
unselfish boy nor one who made friends 
more quickly. No one who knew him 
will ever forget him. There is little I 
can say to comfort you in his loss. You 
have, however, the sweet memory of a 
thoughtful, loving son, and the assurance 
of the deepest sympathy of his friends 
and yours. 

Sincerely yours, 

SILVIA BLACK STEWART 
Elgin, Illinois, 
Apri 2, 1920. 
159 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


The opportunities for writing such let- 
ters are infinite and are limited only by 
one’s time and inclination. If the tenor at 
church on Sunday morning sings an un- 
usually appealing solo, if the minister’s 
sermon goes home more directly than 
ordinarily, it is worth while to write them 
to that effect. When our friends have 
prospered, or accomplished something 
worth while, or have suffered reverses or 
experienced sorrow, it is quite fitting that 
we should recognize these facts. Joy and 
sorrow, success or failure, progress or de- 
cline—we share all of these things with 
our friends. Our joys are increased or our 
sorrows lessened as we recognize the fact 
that our friends know of them and care. 
We can often send a letter when it would 
be impossible or undesirable for us to say 
what we have in mind, and the letter is 
more permanent in its effects than the 
spoken words which we might utter. The 
sad truth is that most of us pat ourselves 
approvingly upon the back when we are 
discriminating enough to discover a weak- 
ness in what we have seen or heard. When 
there is something which can be criticized 
adversely or found fault with we jump at 

160 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


it with alacrity, but when we meet some- 
thing worthy of praise, we say nothing. 

“I worked for a man fifteen years,” a 
friend of mine said to me not long ago, 
“and I am sure I did good work. My em- 
ployer would have admitted it had he 
been asked. Every few days during the 
time of my connection with him he pointed 
out to me my shortcomings and my mis- 
takes, but only once during the entire time 
did he give me a word of praise or com- 
mendation. I came to know that if he said 
nothing he approved; if he could not ap- 
prove I heard from him in no uncertain 
terms.” It is a habit we have, even in our 
correspondence, of sending our flowers 
after our friends are dead. If we would 
only look around, if we were willing un- 
selfishly to take the trouble, there are 
almost daily opportunities where these 
epistolary flowers might give encourage- 
ment and comfort and happiness to those 
who are still alive. 

The effect of such letters upon those 
who receive them is not their only effect. 
Indirectly they influence the happiness and 
the success of the writer. First of all 
they bring him more friends, and help him 

161 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


to hold those he already has. “If one 
would have friends, he must show himself 
friendly,” is the substance of Bacon’s 
statement, and its truth can be proved in 
the experience of all of us. Few of us have 
more friends than we need, and we can 
well afford to hold on to our present list 
and to develop as many new ones as pos- 
sible. It takes a very little thing some- 
times either to cement or to break a 
friendship that has no very strong bonds. 
It is a good business proposition even 
if one is doing the thing from a purely 
selfish motive to write these letters of cour- 
tesy, for there is in it a personal touch 
that cannot help but make its appeal. 
Many of our everyday business deals are 
finally settled upon purely personal 
grounds. There are a half dozen stores in 
town which sell men’s clothing, and there 
is little if any difference in the character 
of the goods they display. I do business 
with the one with whose proprietor I have 
the most intimate personal relations, the 
one who has shown me the most personal 
kindness, and who gives me the most care- 
ful personal attention. I am appealed to 
quite as much by the relationships which 
162 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


have developed between us outside of his 
store as by those which are shown at the 
particular moment of doing business. The 
fact that he sends me a lithographed postal 
card when he is at Palm Beach or writes 
me a letter of congratulations on my 
birthday induces me indirectly to get a 
new spring suit at his establishment, and 
I do not believe that he intends this result 
at all when he takes the time to write me. 
But it is an evidence of good salesmanship 
whether it is practiced by the minister or 
the milkman. It develops one’s sympa- 
thies, it widens one’s interests, it robs one 
of selfishness and cultivates in one some 
of the social graces which might otherwise 
be lacking. It is a sort of humanizer, a 
broadening, refining influence which is 
good for every man. 

These letters should not be long; they 
require no literary skill to make them 
effective. They should be direct, sincere, 
genuine; they should come from the heart; 
nothing would show so quickly as hypoc- 
risy; nothing would be so ineffective as to 
overdo or exaggerate the feeling or the 
sentiments or the emotions expressed. The 
writer should say what he feels and feel 

163 


WHEN YOU WRITE A LETTER 


what he says. Unless he is genuinely him- 
self, he will have failed. 

A wealthy friend of mine was written 
a few years ago by a minister who wished 
to induce the capitalist to give a certain 
sum of money toward the building of a 
church. My friend refused at first, but 
afterward made the gift through another 
channel. “Why did you refuse to give 
the money to Mr. Andrews?” I asked him 
one day, with some curiosity to understand 
his viewpoint. ‘The man tried to flatter 
me,” was his reply. ‘He was not sincere; 
in order to influence me, he said things 
that were not true. I enjoy flattery, as 
every man does; but to be effective it must 
be skilfully done, and his work was 
crude.” 

I have lately been sending to a little girl 
of my acquaintance—she is nine years old, 
I think—the foreign stamps which corre- 
spondence brings to me. She is making a 
collection, and not infrequently I find one 
that she does not possess. It is very little 
trouble to me to slip the stamps into an 
envelope and address it to her. She wrote 
me a short time ago a very correct and a 
very proper letter for a young woman of 

164 


LETTERS OF COURTESY 


her age, or of any age for that matter, to 
write to a married man. It paid me a 
thousand times over for the effort it caused 
her to write the note, and besides, it gave 
her training in thoughtfulness and cour- 
tesy. J reproduce the letter here for the 
benefit of those who have had no experi- 
ence and no training in this sort of corre- 
spondence and who may be induced them- 
selves to try it some time in the future: 


Urbana, Illinois, 
March 9, 1921. 
My dear Mr. Clark: 

I want to thank you for the for- 
eign stamps which you sent me. There 
were a number of them that we did not 
have in our collection. It was very good 
of you to take the trouble to send them. 

Yours sincerely, 

MARGARET CARNAHAN, 


There is no other form of letter-writing 
that seems to me to hold so many possibili- 
ties, and there is no other form so little 
used. I commend it to you. 


165 





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